Aboriginal Art & Culture: an American eye

The Promises and Perils of Mining

Sun, 15 Nov 2009 12:05:02 -0500

Dispossession can take many forms, but for Aboriginal people in Australia few are as physically stark as the removal that occurs when extraction industries enter their country. The landscape which Indigenous people believe was formed by their ancestors is broken, disturbed, and literally hauled away. Even the best reclamation projects cannot restore the shape of the country to what it was before the miners arrived. And aside from the metaphysical concerns that such alteration of the landscape raises, the lingering effects of industrial pollution from chemicals used in processing rare metals or the radioactive legacy of uranium extraction can bring on somatic illnesses as deadly as the spiritual ones that derive from obliterating the terrestrial remnants of the Dreaming ancestors.

The history of Aborigines and mining in Australia is far from simply a tale of rapacity, although that is a theme that resonates in every corner of the country. Arguably the most significant change in the recognition of Aboriginal rights in Australia, that of Native Title, stems directly from the Gove Dispute of the 1960s over the establishment of the bauxite mine near the mission at Yirrkala. The protests lodged by the Yolngu people of Arnhem Land, beginning with the famous Yirrkala Bark Petition, the ensuing legal case of Milirrpum v. Nabalco, the Woodward Decision, and the resulting drafting of the Aboriginal Land Rights Act (Northern Territory) 1976, have forever altered the relationships of Aboriginal people and the Australian government.

The restoration of even small parcels of land to even partial Indigenous control did little to stave off the battles over mining rights, especially across large tracts of the north of Australia from Cape York through the Pilbara, and the stories of the conflict have been told many times in many ways, ranging from Werner Herzog's film Where the Green Ants Dream (1984) through Quentin Beresford's prize-winning biography, Rob Riley: an Aboriginal leader's quest for justice (Aboriginal Studies Press, 2006). Even Midnight Oil's famous song "Beds are Burning" alludes to a mining story: the destruction of the community of Mapoon on western Cape York to make way for the Weipa bauxite mine.

Now a new book from the Centre for Aboriginal Economic Policy and Research, Power, Culture, Economy: Indigenous Australians and Mining, edited by Jon Altman and David Martin (ANU Press, CAEPR Research Monograph no. 30, 2009), offers an extensive review of the recent history, current status, and future prospects of agreements and disputes among the three principal partners in the development of mining practice in Australia: governments, mining companies, and Aboriginal people and their organizations, councils, and communities. The essays included in this volume offer both broad overviews and focused case studies that look at the operations of three large enterprises: the Ranger Uranium Mine near Kakadu in the Northern Territory, the Yandicoogina Mine in Western Australia's Pilbara, and the Century Mine in the Carpentaria region of Queensland. As Altman states in his introductory chapter,

The key question the research sets out to address is whether major long-life extractive mines located on Aboriginal owned land and near Aboriginal communities have the capacity to fundamentally alter the marginal socioeconomic status of Indigenous Australian in a sustainable manner (p. 3).

Overall, the prognosis does not look good. One can start from the premise that mining enterprises alter Indigenous economies, and to alter economy is to alter culture. Or one can proceed from the point argued by Elizabeth Povinelli in The Cunning of Recognition (Duke University Press, 2002) and consider that the conditions for the acquisition of native title rights are determined by non-Indigenous assessment of the authenticity of cultural maintenance through time. Thus, as David Martin lays out in his contribution, "The governance of agreements between Aboriginal people and resource developers: Principles for sustainability,"

Native title is also a very legally fragile form of property right. Its existence depends upon continuing adherence by the native title holders to the laws and customs from which their native title derives. Post-determination socio-cultural changes--including indeed those which would logically result from the positive impacts of engagement with the mining industry--could result in a government seek to have the determination that native title exists revoked, on the basis that the particular groups' laws and customs are no longer traditional (p. 109).

But even putting the threat of such legal challenges aside (which it would have been unwise to do during the Howard years), Benedict Scambary, in the book's concluding essay, finds the odds to be unfavorably stacked. Speaking of the arrangements that have been engineered in each of the three operations that form the case studies for this book (Ranger, Yandicoogina, and Century) he comes to the following grim conclusion.

All three agreements are considered best practice by the mining industry, the state and select Indigenous leaders, for their perceived capacity to deliver substantial and sustainable benefits to Indigenous people. However a combination of the scale of Indigenous disadvantage and the mainstream development parameters of the agreements themselves limit the attainment of sustainable outcomes for Indigenous people associated with all three agreements. ...[A] fundamental limitation of these mining agreements is their incapacity to engage with and augment the diverse livelihood objectives of Indigenous people (p. 171).

Throughout, the authors of the eight essays that comprise Power, Culture, Economy blend insights from economics, anthropology, demography, and organizational theory to illuminate many facets of the changing landscape (no pun intended) of relationships between miners and Aboriginal people, whether mediated by the state or not.

Perhaps the most significant change has been in the attitudes of the mining corporations themselves. From a position in the 1970s and 80s where they battled land rights at every turn, companies like Rio Tinto have now come to believe in the importance of the "social license" to operate. They understand that the good will of the state is not sufficient to the success of their operations and that the cooperation of the people whose lives and lands are altered by mining can be far more crucial than government largesse and legal support.

Mining can offer substantial financial benefits to those communities who reach an accommodation, but often such agreements are only the beginning of an unfolding play of intercultural actions and sometimes unanticipated consequences. Chief among these is the government's willingness to withdraw support for communities that have gained economic benefits from the mining companies. In her contribution to this monograph, Sarah Holcombe develops a theme put forth in a 2004 article by Ciaran O'Faircheallaigh of Griffith University entitled "Denying citizens their rights? Indigenous people, mining payments and service provision" (Australian Journal of Public Administration, 63 (2): 45-50):

'If mining payments are used to pay for basic social services [that are citizenship rights] then opportunity' ... to utilise a significant economic asset cannot be utilised to overcome economic disadvantage. A case can be made that the development of these homelands has been an example of 'substitution funding', whereby the expenditure from mining payments has substituted for government funds that were spent elsewhere. The result is no net increase in spending on services in these communities (pp. 158-159, emphasis added).

Other tensions arise from differing underlying cultural assumptions. Corporations often approach communities with expectations that the funds they supply will be invested in entrepreneurial activities, only to find that individualism is out of place, at best, among the parties on the Indigenous side. Where such entrepreneurial initiatives arise, they are often family-oriented and lead to competition and dissatisfaction among different elements in the community, or different language groups in the affected areas. Indeed, it is sometimes nearly impossible to decide who the parties to such agreements ought to be, what the affected areas are, and who has rights of any kind in them.

Cultural assumptions also provide the occasion for several minor insights in the course of these essays that, while perhaps tangential to the main economic and governmental analyses, illustrate for me just how hard it is to establish meaningful common ground. Martin discusses the many ways in which funds from mining profits might be used by Aboriginal communities to establish new programs that provide employment and "insert their cultural forms and presence onto the mine site." Martin refers to the practice of inducting staff and guests into formal exchange relationships and "giving them a ritual safe passage across the mine site ... a form of specifically Aboriginal health and safety instruction" (p. 115). The metaphor will no doubt raise a smile on many a reader's lips (it did on mine). But such rituals exist for the purpose of impressing upon visitors that fact that the country is dangerous, much as a flight attendant's ritual instructions on fastening a seat belt are designed to warn air travelers to the perils of unanticipated turbulence.

Similarly, Martin points to profound changes in social custom that may arise if the goal of increasing Indigenous employment at mines near existing communities succeeds. Such employment could slow the exodus of young people from the communities. Together with the current rise in population and the tilt in most communities toward an increasingly younger demographic overall, this new employment could result in "enculturation into a distinctively Aboriginal social and cultural milieu taking place within generational age cohorts--such as peer groups--rather than through transmissions from senior to junior generations" (p. 111). The exact consequences of such a shift would be impossible to predict, but certainly pose risks to culture as well as to social order.

The essays collected in Power, Culture, Economy are almost all easily accessible in style and content to the general reader seeking an introduction to the complexities of present-day interactions between miners and Aborigines. They also form an excellent sourcebook for those in industry and government, and in Aboriginal organizations as well, on issues and outcomes social and economic. The bibliography of referenced sources alone runs to almost forty pages. Furthermore, it is encouraging to note that the research that led to this book was conducted under the auspices of the Australian Research Council in partnership with Rio Tinto and the Committee for Economic Development of Australia. Readers with interest in current issues in Aboriginal culture, socio-economics, anthropology, and law will all find the hours spent in the pages of this monograph both enlightening and rewarding.

Because I Could Not Go to Oz...

Sat, 07 Nov 2009 11:21:45 -0500

...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.

Worrying for Kiwirrkura

Sun, 25 Oct 2009 11:10:25 -0400

Thinking about natural disasters in Australia, I am more likely to remember the Victorian bushfires or the massive dust storm that enveloped Sydney recently, to pick just two of this year's traumas. I am less apt to conjure floods. Even when I see the magnificent, brilliant canvases that Patrick Olodoodi Tjungurrayi has painted in recent years, examples of which won him the inaugural Western Australian Indigenous Art Award in 2008, I usually don't remember that this flamboyant style of painting for Tjungurrayi had its genesis in the aftermath of the severe flood that caused the evacuation of his home community of Kiwirrkura for nearly eighteen months in 2001-2002.

The story of the modern community of Kiwirrkura is intimately connected with the story of contemporary Aboriginal painting in many ways. The Pintupi painters who were at the forefront of the painting movement that began in Papunya in 1971 were among the last people to come in to that settlement in the 1960s, and among the first to leave after revenues from painting began to give them a degree of economic independence. In the wake of the Aboriginal Land Right Act (Northern Territory) 1976, the Pintupi moved further west towards their homelands, setting up first at Kintore in 1981. A small group continued the migration westward the following year establishing the settlement at Kiwirrkura.

In 1984, the famous group of nomads whose members included Warlimpirrnga Tjapaltjarri and Yukultji Napangati emerged from their isolation to join the settlers at Kiwirrkura. Family ties to people living in Balgo made the tiny WA settlement a nexus for a variety of language groups, many of whom were already creating the styles of Western Desert acrylic painting. In the late 90s, Patrick Tjungurrayi's paintings still shared many of the austere qualities of Kintore art; after the evacuation of the Kiwirrkura community in the wake of the floods, Tjungurrayi spent nearly a year living with relatives in Balgo (Brandy Tjungurrayi is his brother), and the adaptation of the Balgo palette to his established style resulted in the works for which he is now celebrated.

The story of that flood has lately been retold in the context of remote area emergency management. The Kiwirrkura Flood Recovery Project has put together a variety of resources for both members of Indigenous communities and emergency workers to help both sides prepare for this kind of disaster in the future. These documents and videos offer a fascinating, brief introduction to the community while telling the story of the flood itself.

In 2000, heavier than usual rains in the area had significantly raised the water table and caused minor flooding that washed out roads leading to Kiwirrkura. Then during the period from March 3 to March 5 2001, torrential downpours flooded out the community itself. Residents gathered at the school to await assistance. A community that prides itself on being among the best hunters in the Western Desert region found itself without food.

Helicopters dropped supplies and soon managed to evacuate the residents, who numbered at the time about 170. The refugees overnighted at Kintore, but that small community lacked the capacity to take in such a large influx for any length of time. The next stop was the Norforce Army Base in Alice Springs. Again, this could only be a way station: accommodations were available for only four weeks. But more importantly, during those four weeks, some of the residents of dry Kiwirrkura began to run afoul of the grog.

Problems with the grog pursued the community members, already reeling from dislocation and disruption, when they were settled at Morapoi, near Kalgoorlie. What followed was a diaspora, as people scattered, many of them relocating several times to towns across Western Australia, including Newman, Broome, and ultimately, for many, Balgo and its outstations like Mulan.

Although rebuilding efforts at Kiwirrkura were underway by the end of March 2001, it wasn't until August of the following year that most of the people were reunited in a rebuilt Kiwirrkura. In the months that followed the re-establishment, residents worked with staff from Fire and Emergency Services Australia (FESA) to lay foundations for an appropriate response to future calamities. For FESA staff, this involved gaining an understanding not simply of the Aboriginal connection to country, but also to the way in which the Pintupi understood the activities of the ancestral serpents that brought the floods to the community.

The Kiwirrkura Flood Recovery Project website offers links to an excellent article, "Kiwirrkura: the flood in the desert," from the Australian Journal of Emergency Management (vol. 24, no.1, February 2009) as well as to a series of Fact Sheets that detail the history of the community, its place in art history, the story of Native Title recognition (awarded in October 2001 in the midst of the diaspora), as well as the flood and the response to it.

A short documentary (28 mins.) encapsulating the entire story has been posted in seven parts on YouTube.

The two paintings reproduced below offer a glimpse at the change in style Patrick Tjugurrayi's work underwent in part as a result of the flood and his displacement from Kiwirrkura to Balgo. The work on the left (courtesy of Papunya Tula Artists) dates from 1999; the one on the right was done at Balgo (courtesy Warlayirti Artists) in 2002. Interestingly, both paintings illustrate Rain Dreamings. The earlier work shows lightning (the sinuous, snaky lines) and heavy rains at Nyakin, west of Jupiter Well, where a group of Tingari men visited the Dreaming's owner who was camped there. On the right are designs associated with Mudoon, near where Tjungurrayi grew up: the two elongated rectangular shapes depict rain clouds, with a large rockhole in between them.

Deadly Vibes

Sun, 18 Oct 2009 11:40:00 -0400

I've been traveling this week and didn't have much time to put together an essay. Instead, in honor of the 2009 Deadly Awards that took place at the Sydney Opera House on September 15, I've mined YouTube once again for some videos to entertain you in my absence.

First up is a band that won the Deadly for the most promising talent in music this year, The Yabu Band. The blurb for this video notes that the Yabu Band, which hails originally from Kalgoorlie, is the work of two brothers, Delson and Boyd Stokes, who have been performing since they were five years old. "Yabu" means "rock" or "gold" in their Wongatha language. So try out some Desert Rock Reggae...not such a far cry from the Island style: "Gundalla We Dance."

The Last Kinection is on tour now and they should get a tremendous boost from winning the award for outstanding achievement in R&B and hip-hop. There's finally a decent video available of them performing "Still Call Australia Home." DJ Jay Tee's scratch overwhelms the lyrics on this phone-camera capture, but you'll find some mashups listed under "Related Videos" where you can hear the words better, though you'll miss the excitement of the performance.

The brother and sister team of Joel (Weno) and Naomi Wenitong that fronts the Kinection have had other gigs. DJ Nay, as she's now known, was half of the duo Shakaya, while Weno performed with Local Knowledge. Here's the latter with a great rip called "Blackfellas."

And here's Shakaya's breakout 2002 single, "Stop Calling Me."

While I'm looking backwards, let me give a shout to my favorite award winners from years past. NoKTuRNL doesn't like to be categorized as rap or hip-hop band; they call it rip-rock: "mixing melody with menace and a message." Three-time winners of Band of the Year at the Deadlys, NoKTuRNL can be brutal and lyrical, sometimes in the same song. Their first big hit was "Neva Mend," and I think it captures a kind of joyful nihilism whose very contradictions embody the off-balance and surprising qualities of their albums.

And finally, a nod to the big winner in music this year, for best single, album, and female artist, long-time hit-maker Jessica Mauboy with her latest, "Up/Down." It's replete with the big-time production values that showcase her international (it was filmed in Los Angeles) and crossover appeal. Frankly, I find it a lot more exciting that her winning single "Burn"; but maybe next year....

A full list of this years winners can be found online courtesy of SBS and World News Australia.

BLACKMANSKIN

Sun, 11 Oct 2009 12:09:06 -0400

It 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.

Arrernte Stories

Sat, 03 Oct 2009 11:36:34 -0400

Kathleen 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.

The Irreconcilable Politics of Suffering

Sun, 27 Sep 2009 12:05:00 -0400

Almost ten years have passed since Peter Sutton delivered the inaugural Berndt Foundation Biennial Address at the University of Western Australia. In that speech he lamented the breakdown of well-being in remote Aboriginal communities and decried the policies of self-determination and welfare delivery that he believed had led to an intolerable status quo. Sutton, who had by that time spent nearly three decades studying, living, and working with the Wik people of Western Cape York, seems to have been energized by the repeated loss of friends and adopted family members in and around Aurukun to murder and suicide. Equally, the then-recent publication of Noel Pearson's Our Right to Take Responsibility (Noel Pearson and Associates, 2000) with its call to rejection of victimhood and government handouts provided inspiration for some of his arguments with politics as they played out in Cape York.

I first encountered Sutton's provocative thesis in its revised, published form as "The Politics of Suffering: Indigenous Policy in Australia since the 1970s" in the journal Anthropological Forum (vol. 11, no. 2, 2001, pp. 125-173). I recall being doubly shocked by his article. It was the first extensive documentation I had seen of remote dysfunction; it was also the first blast at what I had thought until then as the unquestioned "liberal pieties" surrounding self-determination and the will to a renaissance of traditional Aboriginal culture and values.

It is primarily the latter theme, the failure of liberal ideals (signaled by the change in the subtitle from article to book) that Sutton focuses on in the monograph that has grown out of the 2001 article and a series of other speeches and writings he has delivered in the past decade. The Politics of Suffering: Indigenous Australia and the end of the liberal consensus (Melbourne University Press, 2009) can still shock, even after years of exposés in The Australian, the publication of Little Children are Sacred, and the Northern Territory Emergency Response. The new book is aptly described in the cover blurb by Marcia Langton as "incandescent, emotional, tragic and challenging."

I think Langton has caught the essence of Sutton's book in those four words. Most every review that I have read has brought out the intensely personal and emotional connection that fuels Sutton's despair and motivates him to seek a new answer, a "post-liberal" solution to the crisis in Aboriginal life. He marshals an impressive body of evidence for the failures both of successive governments and of Aboriginal communities. Many of his insights are keen, and if not original, still pertinent. He insists, for example, that during the last thirty years, governments implementing policies of self-determination have been far more interested in bureaucratic and fiscal accountability than they have in the quality of life on the ground (p. 49). He also unsparingly documents the history of and evidence for levels of violence in Aboriginal life that make those of us who hold liberal, Eurocentric values shudder (Chapter 4, "Violence, Ancient and Modern").

But time and again in the first half of the book, where he enlarges upon the evidence and themes he first presented in 2000-2001, Sutton's despair leads him into a sort of logical desperation. He speaks repeatedly of the "relatively benign" character of mission life at Aurukun prior to the liberalization of politics in the 1970s; I can only say that this seems quite at odds with evidence that has been put forth by others, including Nicolas Peterson in his summary of Donald Thompson's notes on life at the Aurukun Mission as presented in "A Biographical Sketch of Donald Thompson" in Donald Thompson in Arnhem Land (Miegunyah Press, revised edition, 2003):

For many years, indeed into the 1960s, Aurukun was controlled with a rod of iron by a superintendent of long standing. Under his regime and by his hand Aboriginal people were summarily punished by complete or partial head shaving, flogging, chaining, and imprisonment. The prison was a galvanized iron building, seven by twelve feet, divided into two compartments and containing as many a six adult prisoners at one time. For such a trivial offence as late delivery of the milk to the white staff's holiday camp on Archer Bay, miles from the mission, an Aboriginal man, Billy Blowhard, was threatened with goal. Worst of all, in Thomson's eyes, was the power of the superintendent to have people exiled for life to Palm Island simply on his own word, and without any trial (Peterson, p. 6).

Whatever the exact character of a place like Aurukun Mission, Sutton concedes that "the creation of holding and training institutions for Indigenous people under mission and government policies of the colonial era and afterwards ... was social engineering on a grand scale...." He goes on to agree "that it is unthinkable to argue for that kind of social engineering and intervention any more" (pp. 140-141).

And yet a mere two pages later he formulates in its baldest expression the solution to dysfunction that runs through much of The Politics of Suffering.

The evidence is heavily stacked against the rose-coloured expectation that Aboriginal people with a traditional orientation will simply adopt foreign causal theories, living conditions and health practices with alacrity, on the basis that they are good for their health. So it is not realistic to assume that the kind of cultural change I refer to here is going to occur quickly and simply as a result of education or persuasion of adults. The cycle of childhood socialisation needs to be re-geared if the specific behaviours to do with things like hygiene and sanitation, the legitimation of violence, the degree of priority placed on physical wellbeing itself, and openness to preventative health measures, are to change more quickly (Sutton, p. 143, emphasis added).

This is the logic of the missions: it is too late to affect the behavior of the adults and thus intervention in the lives of the children is the only hope. If Sutton is not arguing for "social engineering on a grand scale," he does not explain quite what exactly he is arguing for.

In the final chapters of The Politics of Suffering Sutton moves beyond the polemics of his early writings to take up a sort of anthropological and humanistic exploration of the two cultures and the disastrous results of their collision. He does not assign blame to colonial dispossession, government intervention, Aboriginal separatism, or passive dependence. Rather, Sutton argues persuasively that it is that collision of two very different views of the world, of the self, and of human relations that are the source and the fuel of the fire that is consuming Aboriginal Australia. In the chapters "Bodies Politic" and "Customs Not in Common" he examines the substantive differences between classical Aboriginal culture (admitting of significant variation between, for example, Yolngu and Pitjantjatjara) and the expectations of the modern European nation-state. I think it is fair to say that Sutton believes these differences to be fundamentally irreconcilable.

In his penultimate chapter, Sutton takes an unexpected turn to examine "Unusual Couples." Here he chronicles some of the extraordinary pairs of Aboriginal and European men and women whose names and writings (at least the Europeans' writings) are nearly synonomous with Australian anthropology in the twentieth century: Makarrwalla and Lloyd Warner in Arnhem Land, Bambegan and Ursula McConnel in the Wik country where Sutton later worked, Durmugam and Bill Stanner. Although it seems at first a strange digression into anthropological history, this chapter functions to further two critical points for Sutton.

The first of these points is that we will never know the exact nature of these extraordinary relationships, recorded as they were only from the anthropologist's point of view. Sutton even hesitates to use the word friendship to describe them. He goes on a series of interesting linguistic diversions to show that the concept of "friendship" may itself be entirely alien to the Aboriginal mind in which relationships are chiefly structured by concepts of kinship.

The second point is that the possibility for the remediation of culture clash is never better than it is in such intimate interconnections as these "unusual couples" achieved.

And thus, when Sutton returns in his final chapter, "On Feeling Reconciled," to the questions of politics that govern the suffering of his own Aboriginal relations, it is with a certain degree of pessimism about the possibility of political solutions. He concludes by offering a sort of personal salvation as an alternative to the political: it is only by establishing meaningful connections at the personal level between people who come from such disparate backgrounds that we can hope to work through the chaos and confusion that afflicts Aboriginal Australia.

For Sutton to emerge from two hundred pages of a critique of liberal idealism and "rose-coloured expectations" to such an idealistic, personal, and individual severing of his Gordian Knot was both surprising and inevitable. Surprising because I can't remember another voice in the many arguments about rights and responsibilities, strategies and solutions, to bring the discussion down to this intimate a level. Inevitable, perhaps because Sutton's arguments all stem from his very personal sense of loss, rage, or despair over the violence that has undone the lives of his friends and relations in Aurukun.

But politics is not about individual relationships, although they may be the foundations of life in the polis, the city. Politics works at the level of communities, and of cultures. And Sutton is right to recognize the perhaps irreconcilable differences between these two cultures. Like Tess Lea did in Bureaucrats and Bleeding Hearts, he zeroes in on the issue of repugnance: European repugnance at the place of violence in Aboriginal life, for example, and its converse, Aboriginal repugnance at the mutability of European laws on paper. Both attitudes are rooted in the respective culture's concept of what Europeans would call justice. If such a fundamental issue divides us, how can we achieve reconciliation, if reconciliation is ultimately about justice? Sadly, when Sutton recognizes the necessity of change, he presupposes the prerogatives of the modern nation state and sees no solution except that Aboriginal people change. In other words, he endorses the status quo.

Art of the Western Desert, New York

Sun, 20 Sep 2009 12:28:07 -0400

We 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."

Health Affairs

Sat, 05 Sep 2009 12:39:17 -0400

Tess Lea has written a book of frightening import and importance.

Despite its subtitle, Bureaucrats and Bleeding Hearts: Indigenous health in northern Australia (UNSW Press, 2009) is not so much a direct examination of the state of Indigenous health affairs in the Northern Territory as it is an ethnography of those who are charged with "ending Aboriginal disadvantage in the frontier north of Australia." Lea herself is the Director of the School for Social and Policy Research at Charles Darwin University, previously co-author Learning Lessons: an independent inquiry into Aboriginal education in the Northern Territory (1999) and co-editor Moving Anthropology: critical Indigenous studies (2006).

Bureaucrats and Bleeding Hearts is not another recitation of the parlous state of Indigenous health: that is almost an assumed premise. Rather, it is an attempt to understand how the government tries to cope with the task of organizing itself to address the issue, and how the people who make up the Territory Health Service (THS) cope with both the challenges and the stresses of the work. It examines how the structures and demands of the bureaucracy affect the people who work for it, how such structures influence solutions, and how the entire need to take action in itself generates what Lea describes as the self-replicating process of the need for further action.

And yet the book is not simply a treatise of criticism Lea never loses sight of the earnest dedication and the idealism of the people who sacrifice so much of themselves to the Territory Health Service and its mission. With years of involvement in social policy and as a practicing anthropologist who has turned her gaze not on the exotic other but on the very institutions she herself works for, Lea undertakes the nearly impossible challenge of understanding how her own culture operates in its confluence with Aboriginal society.

[It] would not have been enough for me to describe the faults of governmental policies. This is a book about the existence of the state with the self and the self within the state. My subject has not been the artifice of bureaucratic constructions but their social life, and how they are brought to life by social beings. This is art and artisanry, artifice and facticity, coalescing into powerful systems of cultural reproduction that come together in the orchestral work of upholding the developmental state. A sense of wonderment is called for, even if the cultural mastery at play here remains uncelebrated within anthropology, which only sees a non-fantastic rationality in need of correction (pp. 235-36).

For over a decade, Lea has been closely involved with THS, shadowing health workers on assignment in remote communities and in Health House, the Darwin central office and administrative soul of the organization. She has taken part in bush orientations in communities and on mudflats, often grueling exercises that test physical and emotion endurance. She has also participated in countless workshops aimed at defining problems, inventing solutions, and building esprit de corps amongst the workers.

It is especially in these workshops that a picture of the bureaucracy emerges that evokes my assessment of "frightening." It is frightening because it is so familiar and rings so true. But Lea's portrait reveals how the necessary structures of any bureaucracy inevitably turn back upon themselves and threaten to strangle their intended outcomes.

The workshops allow their participants to raise issues, to vent their emotions, to figure out what to do next. Participants in one workshop described early on in the book respond to their leader's call to verbalize their experiences; the leader (Bob) then summarizes their stories into bullet points on the communal whiteboard. One participant has this to say:

I feel frustrated being seen as a service deliverer, as a doctor first, there only to see sick people. All I see are people with pus, with sores. As a visitor I cannot spend time with people working on more chronic issues.

Bob writes:

>> inability to work up programs

And the trauma for [our] families is unreal. I take it out on my kids ... abuse them for being so privileged. I really coped very badly. I couldn't talk to my husband for at least the first hour after I got back. I would have to take myself out of the house, go for a walk, go to the gym, something .... It was so hard.

Bob writes:

>> lack of debriefing opportunities (pp. 89-91).

The requirements of reducing the complexity and chaos of everyday life to manageable bullet points, to the essence that can be captured and addressed by a program generic enough to be widely applicable, drains the life, the very reality out of the experience of these dedicated workers. Is it at all surprising then that programs born of such brainstorming sessions ultimately fall short of effective solutions to real world challenges? A few pages later Lea laments the way in which these exercises lead to "institutional self-perpetuation."

It is here, I want to argue, here within the selection of hardships to relate (in the well-proportioned anecdote and the emotions attested, in the sympathetic reception and the confirming responses of other), that the complex regulation of the 'romance of raw experience' is accomplished. It is here that the genesis of institutional self-perpetuation and its obscuring from itself can be located. The trick is to recognise the heavy-handed stamp of the ordinary in the extraordinary public health professional. And further to see that these constraints arise out of the close inspection and recuperation of failure.... (pp. 94-95).

In other words, the work of enunciating the further work that still needs to be done is itself an endpoint.... It is through talking that specially chosen words are bestowed with their magical ability to 'make a difference on the ground'. It is through talk work that professionals create shared grammars of both complaint and diagnosis in parades of collective analysis which are immersions in techniques for recuperating past failure into the need to do more of the same (p. 107)

The gap, the difference between Aboriginal lives and bureaucratic imagination is a theme that Lea sounds repeatedly. Those who routinely enjoy good health,whose bodies are not sending out distress signals hourly and daily, can find it hard to incorporate (in its literal sense of "bringing into the body") the experience of chronic disease, no matter how good their intentions. On the other side, those who are forever sick are not impressed by statistics and health information. For health professionals, the overwhelming data about Indigenous ill-health sound an alarm that the sickly themselves may not be able to hear.

It is the avalanche of catastrophe and opportunity that animates health statistics, and which convinces health professionals that a key requirement of betterment is that Aboriginal people know how sick they are through an appropriately alarming rendition of the statistics. ... Our own cultural fascinations are held to fascinate others, and not for the first time (pp. 132-33).

Ironically, attempts at cultural sensitivity can further widen the gap. Lea notes how rare it is for health workers to ever enter the homes of the people they seek to treat. Aboriginal visits to Visiting Officers' Quarters are often treated as intrusions to be quickly resolved. Instead the health officers meet with selected Aboriginal individuals, often those already most at ease with English and Western concepts of health and nutrition, in carefully selected, neutral, and largely whitefella physical spaces like clinics or community centres.

And then there is the episode of the "cursed store" in Numbulwar. Nutritionists were eager to restart a program of healthy eating habits that had been waylaid when the community stored was closed after it was put under a curse by one of the elders. A new store was under construction; the old store stood closed and increasingly dilapidated. The nutritionists carefully avoided probing the sensitive backstory; instead of focusing on the "issues of all-consuming importance in the micro-politics of Aboriginal communities" (p. 166), they focused on menus, food groups, and binders full of laminated photographs of healthy tucker. The health professionals were respecting the privacy of their clients and refusing to invade what they clearly saw as private space. They probably could not do otherwise, but they also lacked any understanding of the reasons why the first store had been cursed and abandoned, the electricity shut off, the food still rotting in the disabled freezers.

In this very respect for what Lea calls "the mystery of Aboriginal difference" lie the seeds of failure for those who wish to do things with Aboriginal people rather than for them, or worse, to them. The crippling legacy of colonialism overburdens bureaucrats whose hearts, in the best sense, bleed for their clients. And at the same time, the demands of the bureaucracy squeeze the life out of their experiences when it comes time to make policy.

Much has been made recently of the failures of the last thirty years, the failure of policies of self-determination and passive welfare, of the liberal bleeding-heart consensus, of policing and regulation. Those who decry the social engineering of those failures suppose that now that they have recognized the futility of these regimes, the better way will shortly emerge or is indeed already apparent. Lea implicitly suggests that perhaps the next solution, grounded as it inevitably will be in the logic of intervention, is likely to fail just as miserably.

Lea herself proposes no such solutions. Her aim here is to illuminate the logic we cannot see in the system that we are part of. She does not take sides; she critiques, but she does not condemn.

Amidst the intense factionalism about approach and political commitment, there is a tremendous standardisation in the logic which explains the need for our interventions, for our very positioning as concerned helpers. It is, as we have seen, such a readily ... generalisable logic that it can be inserted into any situation, with out the need for specific knowledge, of these particular people, their place, their contemporary context, specific histories or intimate local concerns (p.210)

It is a metaphysic which cannot for a moment entertain an order of socio-economic co-existence with Aboriginal people that excludes institutional intervention; a metaphysic which would ask, as pre-emptory response to even this critique, but what else would you have us do? For doing nothing has now become unimaginable (p. 212).

The special genius that Tess Lea brings to Bureaucrats and Bleeding Hearts is that, throughout, her focus is on "specific knowledge, of these particular people, their place, their contemporary context"; she looks clear-eyed at black and white, left and right. If abstraction is the enemy, the challenge is to construct ways of thinking that can function successfully in the structural and perhaps unavoidable straightjacket of institutional logic. In a pair of playful sub-heads to her final chapter, Lea acknowledges "I've met the state ... and she's an anthropologist." She exempts no-one, least of all herself, from the need to examine the issues unblinkered and focused on the concrete, the intimate, and the immediate.

Reflections on the Western Australian Indigenous Art Award

Sun, 30 Aug 2009 15:10:25 -0400

Having 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.

Any treatise that attempts to present an ethnographically alien style of (for instance) art always walks the fine line between the familiar and the strange. Too much of the former risks overemphasizing common humanity, too much of the latter, our diversity; too much of either inevitably does some violence to the complexity and the problems of extending understanding across the cultural divide.

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.

The Western Desert in Painting, Film, and Lecture

Sat, 22 Aug 2009 11:51:21 -0400

There 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.

Desert & Metropolis: Papunya Tula Comes to New York

Sun, 16 Aug 2009 12:40:45 -0400

In 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 can 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.

Pulikatjara, the two sacred mountains at Walungurru within sight of the Papunya Tula studio

Social Archaeology and Aboriginal History

Sun, 09 Aug 2009 11:17:19 -0400

In the nineteenth century the Darwinian theory of evolution and the Victorian belief in progress combined to place the Australian Aborigines firmly at the bottom of a metaphysical ladder of human development in the minds of people around the world. Early twentieth century fascination with the "primitive"--think Picasso--helped to reinforce a sense that the outlying reaches of European empires were temporally as well as geographically distant from the "modern" world. Even ground-breaking and often sympathetic studies of Aboriginal culture like those of Baldwin and Spencer were rooted in attempts to discover the earliest forms of social culture: much of their work stemmed initially from a desire to prove that group marriage, a somewhat indiscriminate form of many-to-many relationships, not only preceded monogamy, but was still practiced or discernible among groups like the Dieri of the South Australian Desert.

The notion that primitive cultures were static and unchanging was essential to the hope that the study of Aboriginal Australians would reveal truths about the origins of man and society. Added to that was the nearly universally accepted notion that hunting and gathering as a modus vivendi was but a precursor to the "rise" of agriculture, and that agriculture was the first step toward civilization as we know it.

And finally, a pervasive and no less important myth was the notion that primitive, pre-agricultural man was largely at the mercy of the environment. Primitive social organization, culture, even survival were dominated by natural forces, and that any observed change in the prehistoric record--population increase or decrease, the invention of tool-kits, even art itself--was driven by humans' need to adapt to changes in climate on in the availability of food on the hoof or in the ground, changes over which humans themselves had no control.

Put all of this together and you have a portrait of primitive man, of which the Aboriginal Australian has long been regarded as the exemplar, as passive and helpless, forced to expend all his energy on the simple yet dominating task of mere survival.

Myths die hard. In scientific circles, a revolution in thought can take decades to gain acceptance within the academy, and decades form to work its way into the popular consciousness. Darwinian evolution itself is a prime example of this. Even today the misunderstanding that "man is descended from monkeys," as if my great-great.....great grandmother were a chimp, is widespread. Ironically, the persistence of the notion that my maternal forebear once lived exactly like an Aborigine persists as well, along with the notion that it is somehow a failure on the part of primitive peoples to evolve that keeps them "backward."

The notion that early man's existence and culture was merely a set of responses to changes in the physical environment in which he lived has been the subject of intense debate among Australian archaeologists for over three decades now; indeed, the debate has sometimes been so intense that the notion's general overthrow has gotten lost in the shuffle. Because thanks to the work of Harry Lourandos, most archaeologists and anthropologists world-wide now accept the premise that, for instance, economic factors could lead to changes in, for instance, tool-making that were once believed to have been stimulated solely by changes in weather patterns or sea levels.

And thanks to the Aboriginal Studies Press, we can now trace the history of Lourandos's ideas and their impact on the fields of anthropology and archaeology through the essays published in The Social Archaeology of Australian Indigenous Societies (edited by Bruno David, Bryce Barker, and Ian J. McNiven, 2006).

In 1980 Lourandos published a seminal article in World Archaeology entitled "Change of Stability?: Hunter-Gatherers and Population in Temperate Australia" (vol. 11, no 3, February 1980, pp. 245-264) in which he suggested population increase in southwestern Victoria after 3000 years BP (before the present) resulted from the ability of semi-sedentary people's ability to more efficiently harness energy (in this case, food) by developing technologies (weirs) that allowed them to exploit the local eel population. He went further to suggest that the increased energy yields were comparable to those obtained by agriculturalists in New Guinea at around the same time. In doing so, he indicated that there were parallel paths of resource exploitation among "hunter-gatherers" and "farmers," where conventional wisdom has assumed that farming represents an "advance" over gathering. Over the next two decades Lourandos marshaled evidence from across Australia in support of this process, known as "intensification," culminating in the 1997 publication of his monograph Continent of Hunter Gatherers: new perspectives in Australian prehistory (Cambridge University Press).

The Social Archaeology of Australian Indigenous Societies is divided into four major sections. The first of these is "The emergence of social archaeology in Australia." It functions as an introduction to the life and work of Lourandos, and includes an interview with him by the three editors of the volume, all archaeologists who have been profoundly influenced by Lourandos as well as having collaborated with him over the years. These three chapters provide a clear and comprehensible picture of the concepts and debates surrounding Lourandos's theories and make for a good introduction even to those who, like myself, knew nothing of the subject before opening the book.

Part 2, "Tyranny of text" examines the ways in which conventional modes of thought and, especially, writing construct our understandings of evidence. The authors here want in part to pay homage to the revolutionary quality of Lourandos's thought and to defend him against those who are still unwilling to acknowledge his contributions to reshaping archaeological theory and practice in the late years of the twentieth century. They also aim to document the ways in which some of the myth-making I outlined at the start of this essay continues to marginalize Aboriginal people's place in both Australian history and Australian society.

One of Lourandos's radical achievements was a great willingness to incorporate insights from ethnographic studies of recent Aboriginal societies into his explications of the archaeological record. As the authors of the essays in Part 2 acknowledge, every representation of the past is shaped and informed by the attitudes of the present, for good or ill. Lourandos scrupulously tried to enhance his interpretations of the physical record of Aboriginal societies in past millennia by means of inference not drawn solely from that record but also from recorded cultural practice. This use of anthropology in the service of archaeology, and the confluence of the two disciplines, is central to Part 3, "Anthropological approaches."

The five essays in this third section cover a broad range of styles and approaches, from Marcia Langton's "social and spiritual construction of water in Aboriginal societies," to John Bradley's examination of the development of technologies for exploiting the normally toxic fruit of cycad palms for food, through Franca Tamisari and James Wallace's exploration of the theme of the transformation of neutrally-conceived "space" to highly charged "place." In this last mentioned essay, the importance of the Dreaming is foregrounded, which brought back memories of the very first book I discussed in this blog four years ago. That was Landscapes, Rock Art, and the Dreaming: an archaeology of preunderstanding (Leicester University Press, 2002) by Bruno David, one of the editors of this festschrift for Harry Lourandos.

The essays of Part 4, "Late Holocene change," return the focus to strict archaeological studies ranging from excavations of burial sites in South Australia through Western Desert rock art (and language) on up to excavations of rock-shelters in the Torres Strait. I found these essays to be the most challenging in the collection, as I have little grounding in the vocabulary and methodology of archaeology and could easily lose the thread of an argument while searching for a concise definition of "Harris lines" and their significance in assessing diet and by extension climate. Once I grasped the convention of presenting raw data and only then following up with a discussion, I fared better; at first I felt hopelessly ignorant, but a little patience made these essays both comprehensible and rewarding.

There is a fifth part to the book, a single chapter under the rubric of "Extending the boundaries." Although many of the essays in the earlier parts of the book do indeed extend the boundaries of Lourandos's work into new areas of research, Barbara Bender's final chapter also extends the book's geographical reach by demonstrating the influence of Lourandos's approaches on the reconstruction of a Bronze-Age site in England's Cornwall. Bender's essay is part memoir, part post-modernist reflection on the field, and part research report. In many ways it unifies the investigative strategies and theoretical stances that have been exposed throughout the preceding essays in The Social Archaeology of Australian Indigenous Societies, including a focus on the unexpected ways in which archaeology can affect and be affected by the lives of the descendants of those it studies.

In the end, such repercussions of how the past is reconstructed and the stories that we tell ourselves about our ancestors do indeed have significant impacts on modern societies. Sadly, in the case of Australia, the stories too often reinforce myths of Eurocentric sophistication and progress at the expense of Indigenous people. Ironically, the romanticizing twenty-first century eco-warrior/guardian movement that seeks to position the Australian Aborigine as uniquely in harmony with the natural world, environmentally aware and in balance, may in fact be unwittingly reiterating the primitivizing myth of an environmentally driven culture lacking in human agency. The Social Archaeology of Australian Indigenous Societies opened my eyes to a field of scientific investigation about which I knew almost nothing; I had no memory of hearing Harry Lourandos's name before reading the opening chapter. But this book also opened my eyes to a new understanding of social responsibility in scientific investigation while at the same time educating me to some of the fundamentals of that science, all of which made for a most rewarding experience.

In Rotation

Sat, 01 Aug 2009 13:10:58 -0400

I find it hard to believe that a year ago I was wandering the streets of Sydney and starting to get psyched up for a trip north to the Darwin Festival and its Santos-sponsored opening concert on the Esplanade featuring one of my all-time favorite bands, Nabarlek. But to quote another of my perennial choices, NoKTuRNL, "Time Flies." This year's show has been moved to the Garden's Amphitheatre and features Troy Cassar-Daley, the Garrangali Band, The Neo, and Lorrae Coffin.

But what I wanted to share with you today goes back to Darwin in 2006, where B2M took the stage with Gurrumul. As always, I'm a little late discovering Aboriginal bands. B2M doesn't stand for "Boyz II Men" (although it might): officially it's short for "Bathurst 2 Melville" and it's the first Tiwi outfit to make it into regular rotation on my iPod.

The band's page at Skinnyfish Music, where you can pick up their debut, Live from the Monsoon Sessions Darwin, describes them as "6 young Indigenous men that sing about the issues facing all young people such as drugs, alcohol and suicide. Their music is an R ‘n’ B pop with a traditional kind of twist to it." You'd think that made for grim listening, but in truth the effect is quite the opposite. Their clean, sweet vocals and gentle mix of acoustic guitar and electric keyboards instill a sense of peace rather than strife, and reflect the band's penchant to accentuate the positive; they've just finished touring the Top End for the the Red Cross doing workshops on "youth diversionary activities in songwriting and performing." Their big hit to date is "Mahlia," which you can see them performing here on the Darwin Esplanade.

Mahlia

Borroloola's Sandridge Band is another outfit that does a lot of public service work with their music, and I've been returning to their page on MySpace a lot lately to sample the variety of styles that they put out with the ease and grace of true professionals. The first tune that grabbed me was "Domestic Violence," which I liked first not for its message but for the spooky way the guys spun from pop to disco to hard rock without letting you realize it. A similar mix of shimmering electronic keyboards and psychedelic guitar licks informs their exhortatory theme song, "Get up n dance" ("Get up an dance for us, cause we're the Sandridge band and we're playing for your people tonight").

And like any decent Australian band, they can mix politics and reggae with absolute ease: check out "Australia," from the Barunga Live 2006: Safe Tracks Home CD, or "Think about our Culture," the title track from their 2007 debut album. (If anyone knows where I can get my hands on a copy of this CD, please let me hear from you.) They also have done a series of road safety spots, like this Drink Driving ad you can watch on YouTube.

While I was browsing YouTube, I came across a number of videos featuring the Last Kinection , whose anthemic "Still Call Australia Home" might just be the masterpiece of Oz HipHop. (There's a cell-phone clip of this from a performance at the Red Rattler available, but the sound is abysmal, unfortunately.) The Kinection is working their way around the country now on their Propa Mad Deadly Tour (check the MySpace page for dates and venues). But back at YouTube, they've got a spooky, clever new video, "Balooraman," up in the last month that you should definitely check out. The track is from their album Nutches, which is available in the US from Amazon (!) and in Australia from sanity.com.au.

Understanding the Grog

Sun, 26 Jul 2009 11:24:10 -0400

Among scholars of Indigenous experiences with alcohol and researchers of the effects of substance abuse more generally, Dr Maggie Brady has no peer. Her studies of Aboriginal drinking and petrol sniffing extend back thirty years and form the most broad-ranging and comprehensive body of investigation and commentary by any single individual. She has looked at the social history of alcohol, examined the habits of non-drinkers and those who "gave away the grog," charted the ebb and flow of petrol sniffing in remote communities, written on the Indigenous alcohol problem from the perspective of actions undertaken by the Australian Government, and discussed the impact of programs sponsored by the United Nations. Perhaps the quickest way to obtain an overview of her prodigious output is a quick browse through Google Books.

Most recently, Brady has produced a series of six short booklets collectively known as First Taste: how Indigenous Australians learned about grog (Alcohol Education and Rehabilitation Foundation, 2008). At about twenty-five pages each, handsomely designed and beautifully illustrated, these pamphlets aim to dispel many of the myths about Aborigines and alcohol that have accumulated over the years. Brady's position is that these misconceptions have reinforced a too popular notion that Aboriginal people are victims of the grog, powerless in its grasp. The defeatist attitudes that are thus spawned among both people Aboriginal and white only do more harm in turn. Brady's intent in this series may be focused--to peel away just a few layers and instill the tiniest bit of hope--but perhaps, as we have all heard many times in other contexts, from little things big things grow.

The first book, "Aims and Ideas," sets out the agenda for the series and presages some of the mythbusting that is to follow.

Aboriginal people traditionally had no alcohol
Alcohol use started in 1788 at Botany Bay with the First Fleet
Outsiders always used alcohol to exploit Aboriginal people
Aboriginal people were the passive recipients of alcohol
Alcohol abuse is determined more by biology than by social and cultural environment

These ideas are explored in the remaining books of the series. "The First Taste of Alcohol" contains sections on indigenous fermentation along with two accounts--one a tale from a startling Aboriginal point of view--of encounters with alcohol in 1788. The story of alcohol prior to the arrival of Europeans is further developed in "Strong Spirits from SE Asia," which focuses primarily on the role of Makassan traders in bringing alcohol to Australian shores, but also looks at early alcohol use in the Torres Strait influenced by contact with the Philippines and Polynesia. "Learning to Drink form the English" first examines the culture of alcohol use in England prior to the departure of the First Fleet and then takes up the story of Bennelong and Bungaree before concluding with a survey of bush drinking in the Victorian goldfields.

I was fascinated by the fourth book in the series, "The story of the bottle," an examination of the impact of glass bottles on Indigneous material culture over two centuries: the "bottle" of its title being a literal, not a metaphorical, reference to the containers that alcohol arrived in. Brady examines the archaeological record that reveals how the concave bases of bottles were incorporated into the Aboriginal toolkit as axes and scrapers and square-faced gin bottles were flaked to form highly-prized spear points. She follows this with an engrossing look at the bottle in contemporary artistic expression, from its use as decoration on graves, to its incorporation and depiction in the works of artists like Joanne Currie and Joan Stokes, to the woven bottles of Ramingining, before concluding with a look at how depiction of alcohol use in European illustration has influenced attitudes towards Aborigines in a more general fashion.

The final book in the series, "Struggles Over Drinking Rights," looks at both sides of the issue, at attempts to win equality before the law as well as attempts to build an Indigenous temperance movement to battle the ills brought with the grog. In this chapter of her examination as in each of the preceding, Brady is at pains to be non-judgmental and to simply present facts and dispel misconceptions. These are educational materials, not polemics. Useful bibliographies supplement each essay, and the clear, simple language makes them appropriate to a wide variety of readers from young students to health workers in Indigenous communities.

The set is available from the Alcohol Education and Rehabilitation Foundation for most reasonable prices: a single copy is free; additional sets cost only A$11.00 each.

While doing a little background research for this post I came across this wonderful video presentation, Maggie Brady: History and Culture in Indigenous Alcohol Use from the ABC. In it, Brady delivers a lecture based on First Taste at ANU's Centre for Aboriginal Economic Policy Research. You can download the program (from ABC's Fora.tv series) to your iPod as well as watch it online. Brady is joined in this presentation by Robin Room, who responds to Brady's remarks and examines the problems of alcohol abuse from a broader perspective of current government policy, initiatives, and culture change. Although the entire presentation is nearly an hour long, a "table of contents" feature allows you to view it in brief chapters of just a few minutes each.