Philp Gudthaykudthay, Miny’tji, c. 1993

Several weeks ago I wrote about a panel discussion at the Toledo Museum of Art in which the topic of restricted knowledge in Aboriginal painting—what Stephen Gilchrist referred to as “registers of knowledge”—created a degree of consternation among some members of the audience.  A couple of people were irritated or offended at the notion that there were levels of meaning in Aboriginal art that were inaccessible to “outsiders.”

The discussion has been pricking at me ever since.  In part this is because the intent of the panel and of the exhibition was to increase the appreciation of Aboriginal art and culture for the members of the audience, to convey the sense of its value, and to impart an understanding of its values.  It may be too strong a statement to say that the exchanges around this topic of restricted knowledge had the opposite effect of creating hostility to those values, but nonetheless I felt that we on the panel had somehow failed our mission. And so I’ve been wondering how I might have handled the exchange differently, and what I might do to correct the misapprehensions.  My assertion that I, too, had once set myself the goal of penetrating that secrecy through study and sympathy seemed to miss the mark, as did my statement that coming to terms with the value system that restricted knowledge was in itself part of the process of coming to appreciate the art.  I have made my peace with being given only public, or outside, knowledge.  But I understood that for others, that peace might seem like a failure in itself.

I also mentioned in another recent post that I’ve been dipping into Ian McLean’s How Aborigines Invented the Idea of Contemporary Art: writings on Aboriginal contemporary art (Institute of Modern Art/Power Publications, 2011).  This is a book that had been sitting on the shelf for a long time; I  put off starting it after a quick browse revealed that it consists mostly of short excerpts from writings about Aboriginal art from many different publications over a span of decades.  I am not by nature a lover of anthologies, and so I decided that this particular volume wasn’t high on my reading list.  But recently I’ve been taking advantage of the odd moment here and there when I don’t have the time to sit down to sustained reading to absorb the snippets McLean has gathered together, and I’m finding it a most rewarding experience, both for pointing me to articles and books I hadn’t encountered before and for reminding me of what I’ve learned from those that I have already read.

Last week,  in one of those brief encounters, I came upon a selection from Howard Morphy’s Ancestral Connections: art and an Aboriginal system of knowledge (University of Chicago Press, 1991) that McLean had headlined “The mask of secrecy: inside and outside, knowledge and power.”  It was doubly apposite in that it bore directly on the topic that has been biting at my conscience and because all three of us on the panel had so often referred to Morphy’s work in our remarks that it became a source of amusement to us.  It seemed that no matter what point we were trying to make, a quotation from Morphy helped us make it better.

The two and a half pages of Morphy’s text McLean chose to include in his anthology bear directly on the problem of revealing “inside” or restricted knowledge, both in Yolngu and balanda (outsider) contexts.  I hope that a brief discussion of some of those points will help to add some nuance to the discussion of what is too often tossed off as the “secret/sacred” nature of Indigenous knowledge.  Let me begin by quoting from Morphy, who notes that there are “reasons why too much stress should not be placed on the significance of secrecy to the system as a whole.”

Yolngu knowledge is cumulative, and in many respects the layering of knowledge can be thought of as a pedagogical technique, though it is one that emphasizes the variability in understanding that exists at a given moment among different members of the society.  The layering is as important as the secrecy, and secret and nonsecret knowledge are organized in an analogous way so that all members of society have the possibility to progressively acquire knowledge and understanding. … ‘Inside’ (djinawa) and ‘outside’ (warrangul) can be used to refer to a continuum of more restricted to less restricted knowledge…. (Morphy, pp. 77-78)

Thinking about the problem in terms of this continuum, or of Morphy’s concept of “layering,” more accurately describes the phenomenon that the dichotomous “secret/sacred” formulation, which implies that the sacred and profane are mutually exclusive arenas whose firm boundary is never penetrated.  The progressive acquisition of knowledge ought not to be unfamiliar to those of us in Western societies, nor should the idea that such progressive learning be subject to controls.  This is what we generally call education, and that we implicitly recognize as a layered process when we speak of “higher education.”  In another sense, we are also familiar with the concept of certification, one which requires rigorous training and the passing of qualifying examinations in order to achieve a certain prestige, or the license to engage in certain activities.  I can build a shed in my back yard without too much external oversight, but I may be required to obtain a building permit if the project is above a certain size.  I would most likely not be allowed to design and construct a house, and certainly not a skyscraper, without being subjected to a prolonged period of initiation and testing.   That is surely analogous to the acquisition of knowledge among Yolngu.  And if Yolngu require such rigorous education in order to paint, where we require it to become an architect, that says more about the relative values we place on those endeavors than about the systems which insure that appropriate knowledge is acquired and respected.

I should note that my analogy is imperfect.  I may be building a shed, and Frank Gehry a museum, and those are quite different activities.  For Yolngu, knowledge is acquired and enacted in the context of ceremony, which I would broadly define to include painting.  Morphy points out that among Yolngu, “the same overall ceremony includes within its structure more or less restricted contexts which people can be denied entry to or admitted to,  Individuals, as they go through the ceremony again and again, are gradually admitted to more aspects of it, until finally (for men) the barriers are removed and the gain freedom of movement” (p. 94).

But what of the commonly held belief that there is some point beyond which no balanda can progress?  This is, after all, at the heart of the disgruntlement I heard voiced in Toledo.  If I want to become an architect and build skyscrapers, there is nothing (theoretically) to stop me.  Here again Morphy offers the critical insight.

The delicate and complex relationship between inside and outside provides the context for understanding the release of knowledge to Balanda.  The release of knowledge to them involves their incorporation within the Yolngu system of knowledge … In order that Balanda should value the inside, they too have to experience it through its release, and their inclusion. I have shown elsewhere that an explicit reason for releasing knowledge to Balanda has been to get them to acknowledge the value of Yolngu culture, to make them understand and consequently to recognize Yolngu rights. In such a case, Balanda first have to be persuaded that the knowledge is of value.  This process of getting Balanda to accept the value of Yolngu knowledge has involved both the release of knowledge on a broad basis to Balanda through the sale of paintings in the crafts store and the opening out of ceremonies to a wider public, and the selective release of inside knowledge to people such as missionaries, teachers, anthropologists, lawyers, and politicians.  Such releases of knowledge can be easily understood as an extension of Indigenous practice in a new context (Morphy, p.98, my emphasis).

I am tempted to say that knowing that there are restricted, potentially unknowable levels of meaning in an Aboriginal artwork should not be viewed as an invitation to prise open the lid on this box of secrets; but rather it offers a moment to stand back and ponder why such knowledge exists and is deemed worthy of control.  In discussing the domain of “inside” knowledge (which can necessarily only exist if there is outside knowledge, since the terms are defined relative to one another), it is important to admit of the possibility, given appropriate understanding of the system as a whole, that one may be admitted where previously a seal of exclusion was in place.

Morphy was writing nearly twenty-five years ago, as his reference to the sale of bark paintings in the “craft store” hints.  Much has changed since then, including an enormous growth in the visibility of Aboriginal art worldwide, and the appetite for it.  Bark painting for balanda in 1991 was still primarily focused on very public presentations of stories and concepts, and that is no longer the case.  Indeed, some of the paintings included in the Crossing Cultures exhibition were created in the effort by Yolngu artists to negotiate and redefine the boundaries between what was traditionally considered inside knowledge and what might now, as the possibility of more fully appreciating the value of Yolngu knowledge is realized, be considered outside knowledge.  What once were secrets may no longer be so.

However, the inclusion of Balanda has not left the systems unaffected: both quantitative and qualitative changes have occurred. …  The overall body of public knowledge is increasing.  More significantly, however, the relations within which secrecy were embedded are changing: the inclusion of Balanda in the Yolngu world has changed, or is in the process of changing many of the internal relations within Yolngu society, and the system of knowledge is beginning to articulate with those new structures of relations.  Increasingly  there has been a substantive opening out as women in particular gain access to certain contexts from which they were previously excluded.  Although change appears to leave the inside : outside continuum intact, the point where exclusion enters into the system and the value of exclusion do, however, change (Morphy, p. 99).

There is a clear message here: Yolngu society (and by extension Aboriginal culture more broadly) is and always has been dynamic, adapting itself to its environments, physical and cultural.  Yolngu negotiate many things with balanda and want balanda to be similarly open to negotiation and exchange.  What they insist upon, and which has not changed, is the recognition that their culture has value to offer others, just as they have been quick to absorb what they perceive as advantageous from outsiders, be they seventeenth-century Macassans or twenty-first century balanda.  In short, knowledge must be respected before it can be attained.  That’s not such an alien concept after all.

This is the place where the ancestral hero, Kiki, came down from the east, a falling star.  Landed in the water and created seeds, grapes, bandicoot, and blue-tongued lizard.

This is the place where geographer Jim Bowler uncovered a 50,000 year-old quartzite core, the earliest evidence of tool-making in the deserts of Australia.

This is the place where the two Dingoes, white and black, followed up emus, feasting upon them before going into two caves, which are seen now as hills to the east.

This is the place where the foremost research on desert wetland ecology takes place.

This is the place where Kalbaardoo, the ancestral snakes, continue to live in the water.

This is the place where the Walmajarri have returned, where the community of Mulan, west of Balgo, provides a home from which the people can continue to exercise custodianship of their country.  Where they are joined by kartiya and together study natural history, paint, and draw maps, tell stories, count fish, monitor changes in local meteorology.

All of this and much more is detailed in a surprising, engrossing new publication, Desert Lake: art, science, and stories from Paruku (CSIRO Publishing, 2013), edited by the team of Steve Morton, Mandy Martin, Kim Mahood, and John Carty.  Artist, elder, and ranger Hanson Pye tells much of the story, as do Veronica Lulu, Shirley Yoomarie, Launa Yoomarie, and a dozen other Walmajarri.  Desert Lake is a triumph of cross-cultural work, both in the activities that it describes and in the making of the book itself.  And it is a work of remarkable beauty in its lavish photography of the region’s natural wonders, and in the reproductions of masterful artworks created by the Walmajarri, by kartiya artists, and by the two groups working  on often astonishing collaborations that combine aesthetic excellence, narrative, poetry, and scientific observation.

The book opens with a suite of photographs and paintings interspersed with short versions of the major Dreaming narratives of the country, those of the falling star, the two dingoes, the ancient snakes, and Jinyjil, the fertility stone that lies on the lake’s edge.  The focus then shifts to the story told by Jim Bowler of his archaeological excavations, conducted in concert and with the approval of the Walmajarri, that uncovered the evidence of ancient human habitation of this oasis of fecundity in the midst of the Great Sandy Desert.  Starting from these two narratives of creation and early occupation of the country, Desert Lake goes on to describe in depth the perspectives of its countrymen, the investigations of the white scientists and artists drawn to the land, and the ways in which those complementary frames of reference have come to inform one another over years of working together, creating multiple histories of Paruku.

The core of the book is a series of chapters exploring “recent times.”  The story of Mulan in the twentieth century is recounted by the late Rex Johns, son of a stockman who worked the Canning Stock Route.  Johns himself worked as a stockman before leading the land claim that eventually returned the country to the Walmajarri and establishing the Indigenous Protected Area (IPA) where rangers today continue the intercultural exercises described here.  An extensive chapter records the life stories of many of the Walmajarri elders in their own words and in their paintings, a mixture of traditional designs and “historical” styles that depict mission houses and windmills as well as scientists with computers working alongside Walmajarri on the lakeshore.

Artists, too, have come from far away to take part in this work.  Mandy Martin, from the Australian National University, combines painting and scientific observation in her ecological studies, and has produced a series of stunning studies and paintings entitled Falling Star that record the landscape around the lake and suggest the timeless stories that inhabit it.  Kim Mahood, whose father briefly managed Billiluna Station in the 1960s, where many of the Walmajarri worked, has long associations with the people and was one of the facilitators on the Canning Stock Route Project.  She has for years been producing painted maps in concert with people of the region; they combine cartography with Dreaming narratives, overlay ecological histories in dots on maps of the country.  William L. Fox, an American poet and environmentalist, has inserted words into other paintings and screenprints created with the Walmajarri elders.  His Paruku Suite, a sequence of five short poems begins this way

gray skies gray

smoke

 

red sun setting

red moon rising 

 

every night the 

falling stars

 

two dingoes

watching

In counterpoint, Hanson Pye led a group of rangers from the IPA in the creation of a five-panel painting that tells the story of the Two Dingoes who came chasing emus along the course of Parnkupirti (Sturt Creek).  After feasting on the emus, the female dingo said to the male

‘Old man, we have to go now we’ve finished eating.’  That dingo got upset being called an old man.  ’Ohh you’ve called me an old man … you should have called me young fella, but in return now I will call you old woman, I won’t call you young girl anymore.’

That is why we get old and die.  That’s why we get grey hair too, because of our Dreaming.

… As they travelled on they just went into the ground.  Because it was raining they got inside the cave and they never came back.  They are still there today.

In addition to the painting, printmaking (with Basil Hall), storytelling, mapping, and poetry, the project partners created a set of exquisite sculptures from wire and raffia,  woven forms of goannas and snakes, and amazing floral displays.  The children of the community were enlisted as well, each taking a panel from a large map of the country prepared by Kim Mahood on which they inscribed fish and pelicans, dingoes and bush turkeys.  Caring for the future.

Much of this work was carried out in 2011, building upon years of cooperation, in a two-week project that, like the earlier Canning Stock Route Project, aimed to bring together Indigenous and kartiya ways of seeing and working to construct new histories of country, new understandings of the stories that inform life in and around Paruku.  The result is this book, a captivating collaboration, a work of art and science, of old and new ways infusing each other with understanding and adding depth one to the other.

Finally, Mandy Martin produced this short video that captures the essentials of the stories told in Desert Lake.  It is well worth watching, but I hope it only serves to whet the appetite for the full experience recorded in the book: this is a story that demands subtlety, that is filled with nuance, that invites reflection.  It is a journey to another country that will fill you with wonder.

Mullumbimby (UQP, 2013) is set in the Northern Rivers district of New South Wales and while some reviews have noted autobiographical elements (her Bundjalung ancestry and love of horses plays significant roles in the story), this novel has taken Lucashenko a long way from the writer-coming-of-age narrative of Steam Pigs.  Jo Breen, Mullumbimby’s protagonist, is still a seeker—she is searching for a connection to her ancestral country—but she is a woman of accomplishments: mother of a teenage girl and owner of a small farm that she has purchased with hard-earned wages (and a divorce settlement), among other things.

There is some irony in the fact that Jo earns her living by caring for “country” in an unusual way: she is the groundskeeper at the local cemetery where the ancestors of today’s whitefellas are interred: the very people, many of whose memorials are faded beyond memory, who wrested the land from her own Bundjalung ancestors.  But this engagement has allowed her, in one respect, to beat those whitefellas at their own game and reclaim a parcel of her heritage, enough to make a home and keep two beloved horses.

Complications set in quickly.  Her teenage daughter Ellen is acting like, well, a teenager, often frustrated and sullen, unhappy at being whisked away from her friends in town to an isolated country life.  Jo’s beloved Aunty Barb has passed away, leaving her bereft of an important connection to family and her past.  There’s a suspicious neighbor, Rob Starr, and hints of a boundary dispute where their respective landholdings abut a World Heritage tract.  Unsettled memories of her long-ago career as a musician are wrapped up with the business of her divorce: more broken links, although she doesn’t especially mourn the loss of her ex.  And then there’s Twoboy.

When Jo first spots the handsome dreadlocked blackfella on the street in Mullum, his physical black beauty excites an intense feeling of physical desire and sets off a riot of warning bells.  In Jo’s experience, men mean trouble, and the better-looking they are, the more trouble and heartbreak they promise.  But Twoboy proves irresistible, the more so when Jo learns that he has come to do research in support of a land rights claim that could restore Bundjalung custodianship of the country around Mullumbimby and provide heritage-related jobs in caring for the land.  Jo and Twoboy become lovers in short order, but there are tensions built into the relationship from the start, apart from Jo’s misgivings about gorgeous Koori men.

Jo has a pragmatic and very down-to-earth need to get her country in order, to repel invasive plant species, to build the fences that will protect her precious horses, and to assert her space and her hard-won rights to occupy it.  Twoboy, who has his own set of family problems revolving around his brother’s son, a kid perpetually on the verge of delinquency and disaster, is often away in Brisbane, dressed in business drag and attending to the distractions of the Native Title Tribunal when he’d rather be near Jo and doing the research that will prove his kinship and connection to the country essential to winning the court case.  Jo would rather have Twoboy helping her quell the flourishing and threatening camphor laurels seem intent on taking over her land.

WIth Jo and Twoboy’s very different strategies for reconnecting with their ancestral land—both of them deeply entwined in their own ways with whitefella norms of ownership as much or more than with traditional concepts of custodianship—Lucashenko dramatizes her central theme.  She wants us to understand that there is no single, simple formula for describing Aboriginal land tenure.  Connections are deeply personal, and they are bound up in community relationships as well.  Entangled with dugai (whitefella) law and custom, they become even more multifaceted and difficult to manage.

When Jo takes a bad fall from her horse while out riding the land, the colt runs off, leaving her winded, bruised, and disoriented, flat on the ground and, for a while, unable to move.  As she lies there, she begins to hear a strange and haunting melody.  Is the land singing to her?  In a lovely touch that shows just how complicated modern life can be when it comes face to face with the power of land, Lucashenko has Jo capture the sound of the hills singing to her on her phone.

Textually, the book offers three major essays, by Peattie, theorist Ian McLean, and curator Judith Ryan.  Interspersed with these are four chapters by Peattie and Benn entitled “Tracing Billy Benn.”  These are accounts of travels that the two undertook through Benn’s traditional country northeast of Alice Springs between 2007 and 2009.  In them Benn tells his life story and that of his family, to which Peattie adds carefully researched and illuminating detail.  The two visit many of the locations that have appeared in Benn’s paintings over the past fifteen years, often pairing photographs of the hills and ranges themselves with Benn’s memory-drenched recreations of them.

These four journeys give the book a geographical organization rather than a temporal one.  At first I found this slightly maddening, I must admit.  Benn’s art, like those of his fellow artists at Mwerre Anthurre, is representational in a traditional Western sense: when we look at his visions of his country, we see hills, trees, and riverbeds and not the symbolic traces of them common to other desert painters’ invocations of landscape and country.  But unlike his fellows, or indeed like the watercolorists of the Hermannsburg school and its progenitor Albert Namatjira, whose work inspired Benn’s career, Benn has not been stylistically static through the years.

There has been a marked change in the overall look of Benn’s paintings through time: his earlier works tend to be sombre in tone, subdued in brushwork, small in scale.  In more recent years, he has grown more expansive in every way.  His palette has grown bolder and brighter and his early technique of small, almost transparent washes has been transformed at times into Fauvist displays on a grand scale.

Artetyree, 2007, 150 x 300 cm

At the 2008 NATSIAA, a painting of his hung next to one by Angelina George and outshone hers in size and in the brilliance of its color.  The work and style of few desert artists have undergone such startling transformations in the course of a career, and I was initially frustrated at being unable to easily track the metamorphoses in his choices for depicting his country.

I was equally frustrated at first by the lack of apparent consonance between Peattie’s photographs of that country and Benn’s transcriptions of the land.  But that very difference forced me to think more closely about how Benn was presenting the landscape and ultimately offered a valuable insight into his technique.  Peattie necessarily stands apart from the hills, shooting them in panoramic angles from a distance.  Benn, on the other hand, inhabits the ranges and even when his paintings have a superficial panoramic feel to them—as for instance when he works on a board or a canvas whose length more than three or four times its height—his perspective begins right in and amongst the landforms.  For all the grandeur that is implied in his arrangements, this is a view from within: from within the rising heights of the hills, but also from within Benn’s own consciousness of the landscape, painted as it often is from memory, from experience recollected in his own poetic tranquility.

My initial frustrations in matters of both chronology and topography were eased considerably by Judith Ryan’s essay “Imagination and Reality: the visionary landscapes of Billy Benn” that, as the penultimate chapter, comes late in the book.  Ryan treats both the change in Benn’s artistic strategies over time and the perspectives, internal and external, from which Benn paints, and does so in hugely illuminating and gratifying ways.  One of the aspects of Benn’s story that I’m particularly grateful to Ryan for explicating fully is the influence of his first teacher, a Chinese woman named Jane, who was the wife of a miner with whom Benn labored in his younger days.  Mention of this seminal influence on Benn’s style was made to me early on by Michael Powell of Melbourne’s Ochre Gallery, but no one I spoke with over the years seemed to know more, if anything, about it.  As Ryan notes,

Benn’s works feature the music of the brush, used in a painterly rather than linear manner to evoke rather than carve out topography; they often rely on interactions between solid forms and negative space, occasioning ‘aesthetic emotions analogous to those of music that bear comparison with Chinese ink painting and calligraphy….

Blackfella Pool, 2001 18.5 x 89.5 cm

Exploring the works that Benn created after Peattie introduced him to larger canvas supports during her tenure at Mwerre Anthurre, Ryan is equally eloquent about his later stylistic development in the period from 2006 to 2009:

He understands the power of empty space, how to exploit a plain ground, and is absorbed by the physicality of paint, its texture and vibrancy.  His square works on canvas are optionally reinforced by energetic brushstrokes; intense colour and the shininess and tactility of acrylic.  A freedom of gesture and expressionistic colour sense characterise these brash and expansive pictures of places sanctified by memory.  His current canvases exaggerate and intensify form and colour but issue from the same vision as his microcosmic studies of country spread out on long horizontals or condensed on tiny boards.

Ian McLean’s contribution to this volume, “Billy Benn, Art History and Outsider Art,” follows the critic’s customary bent to examine the artist and his work in terms of artworld reception, theory, and classification.  It is less an exploration of Benn’s painting in and of itself, as Ryan’s essay is, than an attempt to examine Benn in relation to the concepts of outsider art, naive art, art brut, the theories of Anglo-European art criticism, and finally to the work of Albert Namatjira.  McLean argues that, like Namatjira, Benn is indeed an outsider in Australian society; he is a man stigmatized by a diagnosis of schizophrenia (in Benn’s case) who has nonetheless found salvation in art.  McLean avers that categorizing Benn’s work as Outsider Art ultimately obscures more than it reveals, and claims that “Benn’s art asks us to think outside the discourse of otherness; indeed, to erase it from the lexicon of art history.”

If there is one lesson to be drawn from McLean’s discursive analysis, it is that deep meditation upon the paintings themselves, shorn of labels and preconceptions of all kinds, is equally deeply rewarding, and happily, Peattie’s book offers ample opportunity to contemplate Benn’s accomplishments.  The paintings repay close scrutiny and open-hearted acceptance, revealing the beauty of their brushstrokes, the surprising compositional choices.  I found I could spend an hour just asking myself to be cognizant to where Benn has positioned the horizon line in relation to the shape of the canvas, and how that decision transforms the shape of the landscape, how it makes the sky weighty in one case and causes it to disappear in another, even though that negative atmospheric space may occupy a third or a half of the canvas.  I have repeatedly been surprised to discover that what at first appeared to be a simple line of gum trees decorating the margin of a painting turns out (as in Blackfella Pool, above) to be an exercise in perspective, the tracing of a riverbed from the foreground deep into the foothills far away.  Immanence and mystery play in a delicate balance in these landscapes as devotional objects, and that play is, for me, one of the chief delights in Benn’s painting.  I’m grateful to Peattie for this chance this book has given me to contemplate both what is hidden and what is revealed in the wash of color and the strength of brushwork.

Coda:  I wrote this post several weeks ago, before I learned that Billy Benn had died.  Although news of the passing of another senior artist seems almost too commonplace these days, I was nonetheless especially saddened to hear that Billy’s gone.  The thought that there would be no more of these often thrilling, sometimes mysterious, consistently unexpected interpretations of country struck me still for a moment.  Perhaps it was partly because I’d spent several weeks immersed in looking at the paintings reproduced in this volume.  But I think it was more that I felt a singular voice had been stilled, a vision suddenly taken away.  Despite the growing success of an ever increasing number of Mwerre Anthurre artists, many of whom share common artistic strategies and styles, there has never been another artist whose work resembled Benn’s; he is in many ways irreplaceable and irreproducible.  I mourned that loss in a way that surprised me, and took me back to dream once more into these gorgeous landscapes.

Of all the memorable things I heard during the past weekend when Crossing Cultures opened at the Toledo Museum of Art, that is the quotation that has stuck in my ears.  Especially since the boy in question was racing off with his camera to capture Patrick Tjungurrayi’s Untitled (Illyatjarta) from 2001 (left), a look somewhere between intense concentration and glee on his face.  And then there was the woman who told me that her two sons (aged seven and nine) had brought her to see the exhibition for her birthday.  Pretty cool kids they’re growing in Toledo, wouldn’t you say?

When Crossing Cultures opened at Dartmouth College’s Hood Museum of Art last September, the audience on opening night was rapturous—but then there have been two other exhibitions of Aborginal Australian art at the Hood Museum in recent years, and many of those in attendance had traveled to Australia and had their own memories to inspire their appreciation.

But this opening was a first for Toledo, located in the heartland of the American Midwest.  The last time a major exhibition of Aboriginal art came anywhere close to this part of the country was when the Dreamings exhibition opened at University of Chicago’s Smart Museum of Art in January, 1989.  Now Toledo became the second major American civic art museum (after the Seattle Museum of Art) to host a large show within the space of less than twelve months.

Brian Kennedy came to Toledo three years ago from the Hood Museum; before that he was Director of the National Gallery of Australia, where he first learned to love the art of Aboriginal Australia.  His ongoing commitment led to the creation of Crossing Cultures, and his sponsorship brought the show from Dartmouth to Toledo, where it will be on view until July 14, 2013.

The festivities began on the afternoon of April 12 with a panel discussion moderated by Kennedy in which I was privileged to share the stage with Stephen Gilchrist, Crossing Cultures‘ curator, and Margo Smith, Director and Curator of the Kluge-Ruhe Aboriginal Art Collection at the University of Virginia.  For nearly an hour we answered a series of questions that Kennedy posed, some of them as startlingly simple yet profoundly difficult as “Why is Aboriginal art important?”  (To hear our responses, check out the video that was posted by the local public television station, WGTE.)

Left to right, Brian Kennedy, Will Owen, Margo Smith, and Stephen Gilchrist

At the end of the hour, Kennedy turned the microphone over to the audience—about 200 strong, with standing room only—for their questions.  There was curiosity about the success of Aboriginal art in the United States, as well as about the creation and reception of the art in Australia.  One gentleman in the audience voiced his concerns about what Stephen Gilchrist called “registers of knowledge”: the fact that some levels of the meaning of these artworks remain accessible only to initiated elders.  I had mentioned this point in one of my responses as well, and it seemed to strike a nerve, as it did on other occasions over the course of the weekend.   The notion that an ultimate meaning, a body of information, could indeed by restricted and unknowable to outsiders like those of us in the room was disturbing to some.  I don’t think we convinced the questioner that this was an essential quality of Indigenous knowledge; it just seemed wrong to him.  I admitted to feeling that way myself twenty years ago when I first started my own explorations of the art and the culture, but coming to terms with those registers of knowledge was in itself a product of learning about the culture.  I understand how unsatisfying that response would be to the western spirit of scientific inquiry that governs how we think, but it has been a long time since I felt such resistance to the idea itself.  Crossing cultures, indeed.

After the panel, we adjourned to a reception and to an exploration of the galleries in which the show is hung in an impressive display created by the Museum’s designer, Claude Fixler.  (We’d actually been able to explore them earlier in the day with very few others present apart from the exceptionally gregarious and appreciative museum guards.)

At the Hood Museum, the exhibition was organized along geographical lines, with the large main gallery devoted to a majestic hang of canvases from Papunya Tula and smaller side galleries devoted to, for example, works from Arnhem Land, Queensland, or urban centers.

At Toledo, the emphasis on geography remained largely intact, but the openness of the gallery plan and a striking use of the sculptural objects in the show presented opportunities for mixing up one’s apprehension of the works.  Additionally, strict geographical organization gave way to a hang that focused slightly more on the inherent visual aesthetics of the work: Maningrida mingled in places with Yirrkala, Kintore nestled nigh to Yuendumu and Utopia.  In the main galleries, a series of constructed islands formed the basis for the presentation of the sculpture, and if you followed that archipelago, you found yourself transported from Maningrida to Yirrkala to Galiwin’ku, then on to Melville Island and across the Gulf of Carpentaria to the western shores of Cape York.

The gallery space featured a small antechamber that  hinted at the variety to come: canvases by Patrick Tjungurrayi and Naara Nungurrayi framed a tall sculpture of Tokwampini by Leon Puruntatameri; off to one side, a small bleached triptych by Clinton Nain led to the first thematic gallery.  An opening in the wall offered tantalizing vistas of Arnhem Land, the central deserts, and Cape York.

That first gallery highlighted the works of urban artists, and no doubt confounded the audience’s expectations with its presentation of large-scale photographs, intimate watercolors (by Tony Albert) and haunting graphite drawings by Vernon Ah Kee.  Highlighting the complex issues of Aboriginal identity in modern cities, this room was balanced by the final gallery, featuring works from Balgo, Bidyadanga, and Warmun, where themes of frontier violence and dispossession came to the fore.

Indeed, politics permeated the halls of the Toledo Museum, especially in a room dedicated to providing (along with works by Joseph Jurra Tjapaltjarri, James Iyuna, Nyapanyapa Yunupingu, and Mick Kubarkku) some basic information about Australia and its Indigenous population.  One wall of this room was blazoned with an excerpt from Kevin Rudd’s Apology to the Stolen Generations, and amidst the slides that presented facts about Australia and views of country, the video of the Apology in Parliament played every fifteen minutes.  In another media installation, films from the Canning Stock Route Project provided further explication of the meaning of country and its politics to the audiences.

Text from Kevin Rudd’s Apology to the Stolen Generations, with Joseph Jurra Tjapaltjarri’s Untitled (Pukaratjina), 2006.

Another small gallery seemed to insist that there is something more than serendipity at work when you mass together so many great works of Indigenous art.  Against an intense blue backdrop, Kennedy had hung a brilliant orange work by Johnny Yungut Tjupurrula between two larger works by Yukultji Napangati and D. R. Nakamarra.  Tjupurrula’s painting came from the Papunya Tula exhibition organized by Harvey Art Projects at New York University in 2009.  Napangati and Nakamarra attended the opening of that show, only a few short months before Nakamarra’s untimely death, and here they all were, reunited in spirit.  I shivered at the sight.

The following day, a second small, private symposium was convened to continue discussions of ways in which to promote awareness and acceptance of Aboriginal art in the context of contemporary museum displays.  Thursday panelists were joined by Museum staff Larry Nichols and Adam Levine, along with guests who included Harvey Wagner, Seattle’s Bob Kaplan, Julie Harvey from Harvey Art Projects, Kirk Endicott from Dartmouth College, and critic and Ph.D candidate Henry Skerritt, who had braved the Midwest spring thunderstorms to drive in from Pittsburgh.  That evening Stephen Gilchrist offered a gallery tour that once again boasted overflow attendance, as did my own tour on Saturday afternoon.  It was clear from the comments that attendees made after these tours that many of them had never encountered this art before, and they were mightily impressed and moved by what they saw.  One viewer claimed that the works “came screaming off the walls at you.”

There were more moments of serendipity and delight that day.  My college roommate Dave, with whom I’d reconnected a couple of years ago after more than a quarter of a century, chose this weekend to come visit his sister (who lives nearby) and to visit the exhibition, not knowing that I, too, would be there.  A long-time reader of this blog introduced himself and his charming daughter, shared photographs of his own small but select collection of desert paintings, and left me with a lovely CD of his own music as a thank-you.  Our friends Matt and Susan drove in from Cleveland, and Carol Folt and Kirk Endicott made the trip to represent Dartmouth College at the opening.  For a weekend in a  town that we’d never visited before, we felt surrounded by friends old and new, which made for an exhilarating experience all around.  Photographs of the installation can be seen in the post immediately below.  I hope you enjoy them as much as we did.

reception history is “the history of the meanings that have been imputed to historical events. It traces the different ways in which participants, observers, historians and other retrospective interpreters have attempted to make sense of events both as they unfolded and over time since then, to make those events meaningful for the present in which they lived and live.”

I bring this up because I’ve lately been working my way slowly through Ian McLean’s voluminous How Aborigines Invented the Idea of Contemporary Art: writings on Aboriginal contemporary art (Institute of Modern Art/Power Publications, 2011).  In the early pages of his fascinating historical introduction, “Aboriginal Art and the Artworld,” McLean describes a number of early exhibitions of Aboriginal art and traces the transition they went through from ethnographic curiosity cabinets to fine art displays.

One of the important exhibitions he chronicles occurred in 1960-1961 and was notable for having been organized by Tony Tuckson, then Deputy Director of the Art Gallery of New South Wales, with the collaboration of the other state art galleries of Australia.  Entitled Australian Aboriginal Art: bark painting, carved figures, sacred and secular objects, the exhibition, says McLean, was notable in that “the display of mainly Arnhem Land art was organized in the most contemporary fashion as fine art.”

One way in which that was so was the attribution, where known, of art works to individuals rather than to tribes, clans, or geographic locations.  Among the great figures represented in the show were Mawalan, Birikidji, Wandjuk, Munggurawuy, Narritjin, Djawa, and Dawidi.  Altogether, there were 115 objects, 21 of which are reproduced in the catalog, along with a concise introductory essay by Fred McCarthy.

It was while I was reading McLean’s book that I realized that this particular catalog had escaped my bibliographic net and notice over the years, so I turned to bookfinder.com to see if I could locate a copy.  And indeed, there was one available at a very reasonable price from a bookseller in England.  It arrived last week.

One of the occasional delights of acquiring books from antiquarian dealers is the snippets that you will find tucked into the pages, and this book came with a particularly wonderful document that I wanted to share.  It was a letter from a professor at the University of Western Australia who sent the catalog along to someone in England (whence it no doubt came to the bookseller I did business with).  I’ve scanned the original and included it below, and below that transcribed the text of the note to make it easier to read.  I’ve also redacted the bookseller’s tentative identification of the author, in case it turns out to be correct.

Dear John,

I thought the enclosed obscenities might have some psycho-analytic significance.  They are at present all the rage in the artistic circles here with abstract painters plagiarizing as hard as they can go.  This is the largest collection assembled for years; only some of it belongs to the University of W. A.  If you want photographs of the other ones you can get them at the local museums and dont [sic] offer to pay for them.

The barbarians are upon us, but on the whole less distressing than the English.

Regards from the Exceptions to the Exception

[Sincerely]

Pat

I’m absolutely stunned by the amount of cultural history that’s been packed into these three tiny paragraphs, two of them only a sentence long.

First and most obviously, there is the ghastly arrogance and snobbery in “the Exceptions to the Exception” and the exhortation not to pay for reproductions that the recipient might require.

The letter drips with so much racism that I can’t even get a handle on it.  There’s the obvious reference to the artworks as obscenities that gives us a fairly clear notion of the author’s overall view of the Indigenous population of Australia.  Barbarians, indeed.  Although I don’t know what to make of the suggestion that the barbarians are less distressing than the English: presumably the recipient of this letter, though residing in England, is Australian.

But even if this poor fellow has been exiled to England, he still seems intimately connected in some way to the Indigenous culture of Australia, else why would the letter writer have gone to the expense of sending the catalog halfway around the world?  Maybe psychoanalysis wasn’t well represented in the Australian academy in the 1950s, and one had to go abroad to learn about it?  Of course, the notion that these paintings have only interest insofar as they reveal the primitive depths of the human id, lying not deeply submerged but right at the surface of the barbarian Aboriginal brain, is a classic piece of psychoanalysis (and racism) in itself.

And finally, the letter writer seems to be remarkably well informed about the growing presence of Indigenous art in Australian galleries.  The exhibition is “the largest collection assembled for years” and all the contemporary abstract painters have been “plagiarizing” the work relentlessly.  McLean’s ”Aboriginal Art and the Artworld” essay is deeply researched and copiously footnoted, but this one page does as much to affirm his message about the reception of Aboriginal art in Australia at the middle of the twentieth century than an entire cluster of footnotes.  I guess this is why historians and archivists fall in love with primary sources, a fact my librarian/archivist colleagues repeatedly impress upon me, but which I’ve never felt in quite such a visceral way until I held this letter in my hands.

All in all, this small purchase turned into quite a historical bonanza.

Robert Hughes’s assessment that Aboriginal art is the last great art movement of the 20th century is probably the single most repeated quotation ever made on the subject.  But I can’t track down a citation to its original appearance.  Does anyone know when and where Hughes made this remark?  Book, newspaper, television?  A citation would be greatly appreciated.

***

We’re off to Toledo, Ohio this week for the opening of Crossing Cultures at the Toledo Museum of Art (TMA) on April 12.  Museum Director Brian Kennedy, formerly of the National Gallery of Australia and the Hood Museum of Art at Dartmouth College, has put his considerable talents and energy into presenting and promoting the first exhibition of Aboriginal Australian art to appear in the US Midwest since the Dreamings exhibition came to Chicago in 1989.

Among the opening weekend activities planned is a panel discussion moderated by Kennedy on the afternoon of April 11 (3-5 PM CDT).  I’ll be taking part along with Crossing Cultures‘ curator, Stephen Gilchrist, Curator of Aboriginal Australian Art at the Hood Museum, and Margo Smith, Director and Curator of the Kluge-Ruhe Aboriginal Art Collection at the University of Virginia.  According to a TMA press release, “For those unable to be in Toledo, a live webcast will be provided on Knowledge Stream, an online archive of free, searchable video-on-demand and multimedia content, by public television station WGTE-TV, Channel 30. The webcast will be available at webcast.toledomuseum.org.”

By coincidence, the Toledo Zoo had been planning a “Wild Walkabout” summer exhibition of Australian wildlife, opening on May 24.  The Toledo Blade carried a report in its edition for Saturday, April 6, on the arrival from Darwin of a 17-foot saltwater crocodile.  Kennedy and TMA have been coordinating publicity for the summer events, and the Blade story tells how the Museum reached out through Gilchrist to Will Stubbs at Yirrkala to consult with Gumatj clan leaders.  As a result, the saltie at the Toledo Zoo has been named, appropriately, Baru.

Thinking about Robert Hughes and Crossing Cultures at the same time, I’ve come to realize that one of the brilliant curatorial decisions that Stephen Gilchrist made in selecting works for Crossing Cultures was to focus heavily on paintings, sculptures and photographs that were made in the twenty-first century.  While there’s a significant (in terms of tradition) selection of earlier pieces, especially from Arnhem Land, the brilliance of the show in many ways reflects the continuing vitality and innovation of the movement and the culture it expresses.  With that thought in mind, here’s a brief promotional video featuring Brian Kennedy and Stephen Gilchrist in conversation at the Toledo Museum of Art.

Last May, on our first evening in Seattle for the opening of Ancestral Modern, we stepped out of a taxicab in front of Margaret Levi and Robert Kaplan’s loft apartment for the first social evening of the week.  A kindly looking, smiling man stood on the sidewalk and asked if we were there for the party.  We introduced ourselves and, again, he smiled, as if he knew us.  ”Good to meet you,” he said, “I’m Wally Caruana.”  With my customary aplomb in such circumstances, I said “Oh!”  What else do you say when you meet a legend?

Later that night someone passed around a proof cover for the third edition of Caruana’s Aboriginal Art (Thames and Hudson, 2012).  The image was a painting by the Spinifex men’s collective, a Wati Kutjarra now in the collection of the Seattle Art Museum, a gift from Margaret and Bob.  I was intrigued.

The first edition of Caruana’s monograph appeared twenty years ago 1993, and it was one of the first full-length studies of the movement that I read.  Along with Howard Morphy’s survey, likewise simply titled Aboriginal Art (Phaidon, 1998), it has quite literally occupied a special place on the shelves of my artbook collection over the intervening years.  Caruana’s book is primarily geographical in its organization; Morphy takes a more thematic approach to much of the same material.  Together, the two are fundamental volumes, the first place I turn to orient myself in the literature, a starting point for citations to other studies, a source to check a fact or a date quickly.  I’ve read neither cover-to-cover in at least fifteen years, and that evening in Seattle I thought that the new edition of Caruana’s book would be a good chance to revisit a classic and see how it has held up over time.

I wouldn’t say that the third edition is a substantial revision of the first (I don’t own or have to hand a copy of the second, which appeared in 2003).  It is longer by about 50 pages, the bulk of which is in a new chapter at the end entitled “Into the twenty-first century.”  There are additions and changes all along the way, most of them admittedly minor.  For example, in discussing the work of Johnny Warangkula Tjupurrula, Caruana had originally selected Nintaka and the Mala Men (1973) as his exemplar; in the new edition he looks instead at Water Dreaming at Kalipinypa (1972), which became a celebrated painting in the interim when its recod-breaking sale at auction in the late 90s revived Warangkula’s reputation and career.  The other significant difference between 1993 and 2012 is that there are many many more color plates in the new edition–usually of the same works that were selected earlier, but now presented in a way that makes appreciation and understanding of them much more fulfilling.

Jack Wunuwun, Barritj, Murguruwal, Bunba (Yams, Dragonflies, Butterflies), 1978

Despite much of the textual material in Aboriginal Art remaining unaltered, I nonetheless experienced a great surprise in rereading it.  I don’t think I was ever aware, or have been aware for a long time, how influential Caruana’s survey of the field was on the development of my personal understanding of the art and more importantly in some ways, the development of my own taste.  I have long held the position that Jack Wunuwun is one of the greatest artists to have emerged from the Maningrida region of Arnhem Land, and that Jack Kala Kala is one of the most under-appreciated.  Both of these opinions, it turns out, were heavily influenced by Caruana (and I’ll admit that the former was re-enforced during a particularly lively conversation I had with him during our stay in Seattle).

I suspect that one reason that Caruana’s book was so crucial to shaping my perceptions of Aboriginal art is that he has an extraordinary gift for packing essential information into a concise, structured narrative that makes the discussion of any single work of art illuminating of the importance of the artwork and the artist while also locating its significance in a larger historical context.  Additionally, the breadth of his expertise meant that I came away from the book on a first reading with a holistic sense of an artworld that to that point in time I had experienced only in fragmented ways and with the eye of a dilettante rather than a connoisseur.  At the time of its first publication Aboriginal Art was one of the precious few broad surveys of the movement, then only twenty years removed from the revolution at Papunya, to have been published.  Its synthetic character, which still managed to preserve the awe-inspiring sense of panoply and richness of Aboriginal art that has since become almost a truism, gave me a glimpse of the coherence of Aboriginal culture as well as the abundance of its manifestations.

Rereading the book now, almost two decades on, thus evoked both an excitement and a decidedly pleasant sense of nostalgia.  Today, in the second decade of the twenty-first century, much exhibition and discourse is given over to the riotous and colorful explosion of painting in the APY lands, to the radical formalism of Yolngu artists like Guny’bi Ganambarr, the alchemical transformations of John Mawurndjul,  or the photographic experiments of Michael Cook and the cinematic exploits of Warwick Thornton.

It was refreshing, even revivifying, then to immerse myself in the foundational stories of this art.  To appreciate again the contributions of the early innovators among the Warlpiri painters at Yuendumu, and the first brash experiments in color that came out of the Great Sandy Desert at the hands of Balgo painters Wimmitji Tjapangarti and Sunfly Tjampitjin.  To revel in the epic narratives of “the painters of the Wagilag Sisters stories” (the title of a major exhibition of painting from central Arnhem Land that Caruana curated with Nigel Lendon for the National Gallery of Australia in 1997).  To remember the days before women’s painting flourished at Warmun, and when Aboriginal photographers worked primarily in documentary mode.    To immerse myself in Caruana’s book again after all these years was like rediscovering roots, laying bare the structures and strategies that shaped my appreciation for this art form.

Updated as it is to survey the developments in Indigenous artwork of the 21st century, Caruana’s book remains for me a primer on what made this movement great, the artistic impulses that nourished a nascent marketplace, the inspiration that those early pioneers granted to outsiders to explore the aesthetics of deserts and rainforests, saltwater and freshwater.  If we have become a little desensitized to the brilliance of Aboriginal vision, if the story of its struggles have been subsumed in questions of auction prices realized or not, a reading of Caruana’s seminal monograph will remind us of why this art matters so urgently, and why we were captivated by it in the first place.

Over the years I have seen many paintings of this theme from many parts of the country ranging from Balgo through Yuendumu and down into the northern hills of South Australia.  But now I’ve had the chance to hear a version of the story told in greater detail than ever before, thanks to the genius of creative director Wesley Enoch, the APY Women’s Council, the National Museum of Australia, and the Australian National University in concert with the Songlines Project under the direction of Diana James.  As part of the celebrations of the centennial of Canberra, the Songlines Project staged Kungkarangkalpa: Seven Sisters Songline on the shores of Lake Burley Griffin earlier this month.

It looked to be a bitterly cold night.  The audience was well insulated in heavy coats and beanies.  The women who sang were wrapped in blankets before a fire, but the poor dancers, dressed in little more than body paint and feathers, must have been having a hard time of it.  Not that you could tell; the grace of their performance was unaffected by the wind that made the flames onstage tremble.

The production is visually stunning.  A large, multipart screen allowed for the projection of amazing visuals ranging from landscape portraits of Atila (Mt Connor), the locus of this instance of the Dreaming to cave paintings, bush fires, and celestial maps.  There’s one incredible sequence in which the shadow cast by Tapaya Edwards, who plays Wati Nyiru is transformed into the silhouette of an enormous tree–only one of the many magical transformations that take place in the course of the telling of this story.  And although the libretto, Inawinytji Williamson with translation by Diana James, is largely sung, supertitles and interspersed narration make it simple to follow the episodes of the action.

But I won’t say more.  The magic was captured during the March 2 performance, and is available for all to see on Vimeo.  Have a look–it’s wonderful theatre from start to finish—especially at the end when the sisters are transformed into stars floating above the audience.