My friend Philip (who’s associated with the Grey Art Gallery) recently alerted me to their marvellous show of Early Papunya Paintings currently on at the Gallery: Icons of the Desert, Early Aboriginal Paintings from Papunya.
(Pictured on the left is Rainbow and Water Story, ca. August 1972, by Old Walter Tjampitjinpa (Pintupi, ca. 1912–1981) – Synthetic polymer paint on composition board, 61 x 52 cm.)
If you click through to the show (go first to Grey Art Gallery) there’s a wonderful set of images, plus reviews and video clips. The show contains 50 works, almost all of them produced during the first years of Papunya painting. For a good review and images, try the Aboriginal Art and Culture: an American Eye site. And, for a good summary of the complex social-political issues engendered by the work and by Aboriginal Art in general, see this review by Nicolas Rothwell in The Australian:
Almost four decades after the initial creative burst at Papunya settlement, the first deep, detailed catalogue of desert boards reveals in unvarnished fashion a key, all-shaping feature of our relationship to western desert art: what we think we know about the dreamings and the sacred traditions, and the ancestral creators and the rites encoded in the boards is at best a surface gloss. Not only is the tradition full of ambiguity, not only are the accounts given of the art cryptic, mere coded hints at secret material: the explanations of the works that we have from many of the artists are often concealed behind a veil of imperfect communication. And the pattern goes wider: with such ambiguity at the wellspring of the painting movement, what outside accounts of later desert art can be taken as fixed, literal truth?
At this time when there is growing resistance from some Aboriginal elders to the depiction of secret and sacred knowledge, it seems best to me to attempt to stay close to the visual, to appreciate what traces have been made available to us from a ancient culture, as yet further evidence of the profound riches of the human psyche.
And on the left, another (more recent) work from the show.
Untitled, 2003
Ronnie Tjampitjinpa (Pintupi, born 1943)
Acrylic on linen, 151 x 183 cm
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Tommy Watson
Artilanja, 2008
Acrylic on canvas, 160 x 200 cm
I attended the opening of the new Tommy Watson exhibition at Agathon Galleries last Saturday and was stunned by the richness and uniqueness of this work – here is something new in Aboriginal Art.
It’s too early for me to say if I like it all, but I see that it’s very different, and the genuine voice of an artist who has followed his internal journeys – which are always changing, yet remain firmly rooted in traditional knowledge.
Tommy evidently says, when people ask him to paint something similar to what he’s already done, that he can’t – “I’ve been there before, I can’t go back there again”. Although he began painting only in 2001 or so, and has produced only a couple of hundred paintings, he now has an international reputation.
For him the process of painting is like a meditation. He works as if in a trance – and while he does he drops in and out of song…and when he is not painting he lives as if in another world…it’s a deeply spiritual and cultural place, with his attention and consciousness turned inwards, as if in singular contact with his ancestors…his frame of mind seems to be in the same place as would be that of his people some 1000 years ago.
At the opening, the SMH critic John McDonald spoke of watching Watson working at his studio in Alice Springs, and how as he takes the paintbrush on a journey over the canvas, one that can stop or become diverted at any time. The overall effect is of interpenetrating layers of colour and rich meanderings.
Tommy was born around 1935 and is a senior Pitjantjatjara elder and Law Man. He lived a semi-nomadic life in his youth, ranging over thousands of kilometres in some of the most extreme and unforgiving regions of Western Australia. Later he was a stockman. I was particularly struck by how this man’s hard life and rich traditional knowledge has informed his work – and also struck by the seriousness with which he takes the art making process, and his desire to transmit some of the Dreaming process (though much of it remains secret). (Quotations above are taken from the gallery notes, by John Ioannou.)
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Here’s an artist whose work I love – Billy Benn Perrurle Artetyerre. The Aboriginal collection at the AGNSW is currently closed for renovations so, not being able to see his energetic works there, I’ll post some here.
Billy Benn Perrurle Artetyerre
Bindi, Acrylic on board, 10 x 16 cm
Billy Benn Perrurle Artetyerre
Acrylic on linen
Billy Benn Perrurle Artetyerre
Harts Range, pre 1997, Utopia, acrylic on fibreboard panel
(Collection of the National Gallery of Australia)
It can be hard to track down information about Aboriginal artists, but this Indigenart exhibition page has some interesting background on the man. I like this quotation from Catherine Peattie, Arts Co-odinator at Mwerre Anthurre Artists:
Residing in Alice Springs the Mwerre Anthurre Artists only occasionally get to visit their country. As a result, they paint their county from memory. Remembering and painting country becomes a bittersweet experience. It is a celebration of connection to place with each new painting reinvigorating their culture, contrasted against a sadness at their separation from such a significant space. Carrying the country within, Billy Benn says when he sees that country in his mind’s eye his spirit is there, and his spirit lifts. The paintings are imbued with such a sense of place that laws of time and space become circular as we the viewer are transported to this country.
These are works that connect with my own interest in remembered landscapes, that inevitably become, in part at least, landscapes of the imagination. Such landscapes can also be strong reminders from what is behind landscape, behind our own psychic landscapes – that other landscape of the noumenal, our essence, which I continue to write about and attempt to articulate in my own art making.
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More from the recent Voyages of the Ancestors – Vaka Moana exhibition: here’s a rebbelib or chart-stick, a navigational teaching aid from the Marshall Islands.
From the caption in the gallery:
Marshall Islands sailing systems demand extensive knowledge of local currents and swells. Rebbelib are used to instruct apprentice navigators about the direction of ocean currents and the resulting swell and wave patterns as these currents encounter and then move around islands, marked by cowrie shells. Used only as teaching aids, rebbelib were not taken on to canoes.
This is an art piece in its own right – a device with hints of Duchamp’s Large Glass (with it’s “playful physics”); or like a Rover Thomas work, depicting land form, in this case relating to sea but no less instructive of country.
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We Australians are often disparaging about Canberra – the large federal buildings “like white tombstones in the sun”, someone recently suggested to me. But I like visiting there, and whenever we go to the NSW South Coast we always take the inland route – as we did on our recent Christmas trip.
Canberra bakes silently at Christmas – everyone flees to the coast – and it’s a good time to look at the city as a project of mark and form making in the land, of surgical incisions (the Griffin land axis) that leave no doubt about our occupation. I wrote about it last May (Occupied territory of another sort), recounting New Years Eve there in 2007.
So going back again, here’s a picture I took at the Aboriginal Tent Embassy, on 2 Jan of this year. Dead quiet – I don’t know where the inhabitants were, and a jumbled mess that’s still, after 37 years, an embarrassment to the Federal Government, amongst others. (Behind is old Parliament House, where we had a “civilised” afternoon coffee and cake.)
Then wandering around, with the nearby rose garden ablaze with red roses, I was struck again by the incongruity of the elements of the scene. Here are the roses (with Tent Embassy behind).
There’s some mix here that effects me in way I haven’t yet quite nailed -
Walter and Marion Griffin from the US planning the model city, the blooming roses, the First Australians who doggedly camp on the Griffins’ axis, old Parliament House blazing away in the sun, and a dream or collective memory I get about a figure poised on this or some parallel axis, a figure that knows of both land and water axes, one I wanted to depict in the linocut to the left (figure on a land/ water axis).
I spoke about him at the time I originally posted him as:
a figure in touch with some kinds of ceremonial or “knowledge-based” markings in the land and/or water.
He’s wandering around again, and he saw the meteors that passed overhead and fell, fell on the land, fell on the sea…
Ron Dowd
figure on a land/water axis
linocut, collage 2008, 30cm x 5cm
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by Ron Dowd on November 26, 2008
in Other
We’ve been having wet weather and odd winds for the last few days, as we move through one of our local seasons towards the January heat. I say “one of” because having lived in Sydney for more than 20 years I don’t have an experience of four seasons – despite continuing attachments here to the northern hemisphere idea that we have four.
According to Wesley Roe and Marjorie Lakin Erickson, Sydney, in the meteorology of the First Australians, in fact has six seasons. Each is related to the flowering of native plants:
- September to October is Murrai’yunggoray. The red waratah flowers, and temperatures start to rise.
- November to December is Goraymurrai. The hickory wattle flowers. Warm, wet weather and the chance of flooding.
- January to February is Gadalung marool. The wattle flowers are hot and dry. First Australians ate fruit and seeds, as meat would spoil.
- March to May is Banamurrai’yung. The lillipilli (of which we have a beautiful specimen, just outside on the street) has its sour berries. A time of wet weather and cooling temperatures.
- June to July is Tugarah’tuli. The forest red gum flowers. Cold weather, traditional peoples travel to the coast.
- August is Tugarah’gunyamarra. The wattle flowers. Cold and windy. Traditional peoples travel back to the western highlands, following fish upstream.
This is a preamble to reports of allergies amongst friends, and my own conjunctivitis which has this week limited my interest in the computer screen.
Which in turn leads me to this NY Times post on slow blogging, one that’s been linked to now from a few blogs I follow. It’s a good reminder to me to strive for depth rather than frequency, which I intended doing when starting this blog (“Occasional notes on…”). I notice it’s easy to get subtly hooked into frequency however, particularly when the blog becomes a point of contact with like-minded people – something I’ll try to watch, as I remember the “occasional”.
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by Ron Dowd on November 11, 2008
in Other
I’m reflecting on the freedom I have to make art in my life (in the widest sense of the idea of art making) – and thinking of Mulrunji Doomadgee, who died within forty minutes of being put in the Palm Island lock-up, for a misdemeanor, in 2004.
The sorry sentencing of Lex Wotton (charged with inciting a subsequent riot) is the latest in this tale, told again on the ABC radio program The sentencing of Lex Wotton this morning.
Here’s Andrew Boe (Queensland criminal lawyer), towards the end of this program, his words carrying the weight of a man impassioned in his truth-telling:
…where in the history of this matter, has there been any acknowledgement of those responsibilities? Where has there been an appreciation that this man should never have been arrested for swearing on the street? Never been placed into custody. Should not have been left in a situation where there was manhandling by one police officer in a fashion that that sort of injury should occur. Where has there been an acceptance that leaving him on that cement floor for three hours to die in excruciating pain was acceptable? Where has there been an embracement of the conditions that these watch houses are set up in where the monitor video that was capturing this was not being heard by the Senior Sergeant and other people shortly just outside? Where has there been an acceptance that the investigation with all its shortcomings, and they’ve been so clearly set out in CMC [Queensland's Crime and Misconduct Commission] reports, where has there been an appreciation that what we did here was very wrong, and how we went about examining it was wrong, and flawed.
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I’m watching the brilliant First Australians series at the moment on SBS television and last night in Episode 4 was struck by the intelligence and artistic sophistication of the Arrernte people in their nightly ceremonies which they have conducted for many thousands of years, and continued to conduct in the face of dogged manipulation and disrespect by (so-called) Christian missionaries.
(This blog title is taken from a reader’s comment on the episode. Scroll down on the SBS page for many heart-felt responses from viewers to Episode 4.)
Outsider art is probably one of the nearest things we in the West have to such rich psychic revelation as Arrernte ceremonies. Outsider art, for me, is a name for an art unmediated by the strictures of current artistic and philosophic ideologies and critical fashion. It is an art much more significantly distinct from the current mainstream than some commentators imply (the supposed distinction often being between an art of the “uneducated” and that of the “educated”.) What many outsiders do is a Western version of the evening ceremony, the ritual of “singing up” the cultural and spiritual energies of the psyche and of life itself.
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Emily Pwerle paints Awleye Atnwengerrp (women’s ceremony) dreaming at Utopia, Northern Territory. (See this article on her.)
Here’s a lovely work of hers, and I’m struck by the connection with it and Merleau-Ponty’s “the whole landscape is overrun with words” (see previous post).
Emily Pwerle – Awelye (UGEP4552) (around 1930 – )
Acrylic on linen, 122 cm x 90 cm
Of course, the language (set of symbols) she uses is somewhat different to Western languages, consisting of the breast painting and bush tomato yam of women’s business. But the symbols crowd, positively overrun the “land” in a joyful energetic way that I find pleasing. Emily and her sisters (and of course many other Aboriginal artists) paint on the ground, and this “earthing” of the process is very different from how Western artists usually work (creating the work in the vertical rather than the horizontal). And when we purchase these works we can hang them any way we like – and they are still very effective. In fact, some galleries sell Aboriginal works with four sets of D-clips on the back (one for each side) – underlining the fact that no one way is considered “up”.
Here’s an article on the Pwerle sisters and their approach to painting.
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