AGOD's clearance sale

As Hank Ebes, founder of the Aboriginal Gallery of Dreamings (AGOD), holds a second clearance sale of works from his Cheltenham warehouse, it is hard to know whether to be saddened or elated. After all, the closing of AGOD marks the end of an era - and of an extraordinary institution. Looking through the works on the block, however, is enough to blow away those doldrums. The 353 lots in the catalogue summarize the historical emergence of the Western and Central Desert art movements and the painting cultures of the Kimberly and Top End. This post inspects a few of the works that captivate me - but don't let my choices keep you from taking your own tour of the auction lots. And as this is only the second of a series of ten projected auctions of works culled from Mr. Ebes collection, there are more treasures to come.

Before perusing the paintings, though, a sketch of their collector is in order. Adrian Newstead of Coo-ee Gallery in Bondi Beach has said of Ebes: "He's the sort of bloke who makes money. He's a lone ranger; you love him or you hate him. Most people in the 'official' part of the [Aboriginal art] industry don't like him - I'm hesitant to say loathe him." To say that Ebes' backstory is unusual for a gallerist is an understatement. Born in Holland, he moved to the U.S. where, in the late-'50s, he delivered flowers and trekked through neighborhoods selling door-to-door, working illegally without a green card. With immigration authorities hot on his tail, Ebes fled to Australia in the early-'60s. After trying his hand at zinc mining and crop dusting, he made a his first killing by marketing 'Pong' to andtipodean videogamers. Using the proceeds to buy antiquarian books and prints, Ebes enraged art dealers by buying historical volumes and cutting them apart to sell the prints individually - a practice called "bookbreaking." Selling off the contents of four books by the 19th century ornithologist John Gould, Ebes generated $1.6 million from an initial $550,000 investment, completing the transactions just weeks before the 1987 stock market crash.

Casting about for another potentially profitable business during Australia's ensuing recession, Ebes began to buy contemporary Aboriginal art at a time when its primary market consisted of foreign tourists. Given the downturn in the Australian dollar, targeting buyers armed with American and European currencies made perfect business sense. Bypassing the system of indigenous community art centres put in place to ensure fair trade practices, Ebes bought directly from desert artists, undercutting competing gallerists and earning a new circle of enemies.

Within a decade, however, Ebes relationship to Aboriginal art had changed from all business to genuine appreciation. His greatest achievement in both regards came with his purchase of Clifford Possum Tjapaltjarri's epic work, Warlugulong, painted in 1977. The 2 x 3.3 meter canvas is named for a site associated with Lungkata, an ancestral blue-tongued lizard and the central dreaming motif of Possum's painting. Commonwealth Bank was the original owner, having purchased the work for $1,200 in 1977. After years of neglect as an overlooked wall hanging in a training facility cafteteria, Possum's masterpiece was put up for auction without fanfare or a clue about its worth, cultural or financial. The bank expected a return of about $5,000. Art insiders knew better. Ebes leveraged several million in preparation for a protracted auction battle, but was able to purchase the work for $36,000, plus commission. It graced Ebes' living room until 2007, when a break-in in his Bourke Street gallery gave him pause. Put up for auction at Sotheby's, the work sold for $2.4 million on 24 July 2007, breaking all previous market records for indigenous Australian art. The buyer, Canberra's National Gallery of Australia, considered the work the most important in its collection.

In addition to the Aboriginal Gallery of Dreaming on Bourke Street in Melbourne, Ebes' art business generated an institution devoted to exhibiting and promoting the best of his collection. Nangara, meaning 'special place,' was the name of Ebes' collection of pivotal works - dating back to the early '70s and the origins of western desert painting - and of the exhibition that introduced Australia's indigenous art movement to new audiences in France, Belgium, Holland, Germany, Denmark, Japan and the U.S. To again quote Adrian Newstead on Ebes: "He's not politically correct, but if you ask me if he's done a great job promoting Aboriginal art, I would say 'yes,' unreservedly." With the loss of his gallery lease in 2008, Ebes closed AGOD and moved his documentary and cataloguing activities to the Cheltenham warehouse, where 3,000 paintings culled from the collection await sale over the next five years. Having perused the auction catalogue of this second sale, here are some of my favorites.

Peggy Mbetyarre

Women's Ceremony, 1989

150.5 x 122 cm.

Estimate: $3,000 - 5,000 AUD

Combining Western iconography and painting techniques associated with Western Desert art, Mbetyarre's Women's Ceremony adopts an aerial perspective to look backin time at scenes from nomadic daily life. Silhouetted women hunt, use digging sticks to collect roots, carry an elongated wood dish called a 'coolamon,' and grind seeds for roasting. Elegantly composed with a beautifully integrated palette of ochres complemented by olive green foliage, Mbetyarre's canvas conveys a nostalgic remembrance of things past.

Walangkura Napanangka

Women's Dreaming at Marrapinti, 1998

91 x 91 cm.

Estimate: $3,500 - 5,500 AUD

Walangkura began painting in 1995, after working on the collaborative Minyma Tjukurrpa canvas at the historic Kintore/Haasts Bluff women's art project organized by Marina Strocci. Women's Dreaming reproduces the network pattern of roundels seen in classic Tingari Cycle paintings usually associated with male painters. Marrapinta, a rockhole site in Western Australia, is remembered in dreamings as the place a group of powerful ancestral women camped and ritually initiated younger women while traveling eastward, creating and 'opening up' country, becoming the physical features of the landscape they traversed. With its molten red and orange tones and vigorous draftsmanship, Women's Dreaming showcases the high quality of works produced for the Aboriginal-owned and operated Papunya Tula Artists group.

Jonathan Kumuntjara Brown

Maralinga, 1996

121 x 90 cm.

Estimate: $4,500 - 9,000 AUD

Jonathan Kumuntjara Brown applies the vocabulary of Western Desert art to the tragedy of Maralinga (meaning 'thunder fields), a remote area of South Australia expropriated from the Tjarutja people in the 1950s to create a nuclear testing range for British atomic warheads. While the official story was that the site was uninhabited and uninhabitable, in fact Maralinga was crossed by important 'songlines' associated with dreamings that linked desert peoples with their ancestral heritage and culture. Because the sprawling site was unfenced and inadequately patrolled, nomads wandered through contaminated territory, camping in bomb craters and trapping rabbits blinded by cobalt poisoning. Australian and British soldiers were also involuntary test subjects at Maralinga, a cold war scandal only revealed in the 1980s. Brown's painting underscores the contemporaneity of Western Desert painting and its capacity to represent living history as well as the infinite past of ancestral dreamings.

Michael Nelson Jagamarra

Yam Dreaming, 2001

150 x 120 cm.

Estimate: $3,500 - 6,500 AUD

Michael Nelson Jagamarra's Yam Dreaming crackles with the jagged energy of desert life rather than Maralinga's forces of destruction. The desert yam (Ipomoea costata or 'bush potato'), harvested throughout the year, was a staple food for Aboriginal nomads throughout Central Australia. Its importance is reflected in proprietary dreamings, ritual ceremonies held to insure the plant's productivity, and paintings devoted to this vegetal spirit being and its associated sites. In this iteration of the Yam Dreaming story, Michael Nelson Jagamarra endows us with x-ray vision. A bulls-eye roundel marks the point at which the plant pulunges into the desert soil. Tuberous roots branch outward, forcing their way to the edges of the canvas. Seemingly monochromatic, the canvas upon closer inspection (click on the image for an enlargement) is flecked with a few invigorating red spatters that bring it to life.

Jack Britten

Frog Hollow, 1995

91 x 80 cm.

Estimate: $5,500 - 8,000 AUD

Britten, a life-long stockman turned painter in retirement, was a traditional custodian of the Bungle Bungle Range, a unique landscape of horizontally banded, beehive shaped sandstone formations towering over the Ord River grasslands. Like other artists of the Warmun Art Center, Britten used locally collected natural ochres, ground into a pigment and mixed with a binding medium, to create paints that quite literally infused his canvases with local color. Britten went even farther, sometimes adding kangaroo blood to red ochres. These ritually evocative materials convey the multivalence of Britten's work, which is as layered as the sandstone landforms it portrays. His charming representation of an iconic Kimberly landscape is simultaneously an expression of gnarangani (dreaming) sagas and events.

Jack Dale

Map of Country, 2007

114 x 90 cm.

Estimate: $4,000 - 6,000 AUD

Like Jack Britten, Jack Dale Mengenen worked as a Kimberly stockman in a remarkable life that bridged two cultures. The son of Moderra, an Ngarinyin woman, and Jack Dale, a Scottish immigrant, Dale the younger grew up at a time when white cattlemen imprisoned and sometimes killed indigenous people for attempting to exercise their rights as traditional custodians of country transformed by pastoral use. His childhood abuse ended with his father's death, when Jack escaped to the bush. Raised and taught traditional ways by his maternal grandfather, he became respected both as a skilled stockman and an initiated tribal elder. He is a traditional custodian of Imanji, located near the Mt. House Station ranch worked by his father. Map of Country delineates the spiritual cartography of the site with terse forms rendered in natural ochres and synthetic polymers: a palette of materials as culturally hybrid as the artist's life.

Emily Kame Kngwarreye

Yam Dreaming, 1995

305 x 199 cm.

Estimate: $1,100,000 - 1,400,000 AUD

Clearly the jewel in the crown for AGOD's second auction, Yam Dreaming is a sister canvas to the larger work by the same name held by the National Gallery of Victoria and featured in the Emily Kame Kngwarreye retrospective exhibition mounted by the National Gallery of Australia, which was seen from Canberra to Tokyo (where it drew more visitors than a retrospective of the work of Andy Warhol). Ebes' Yam Dreaming, like the NGV canvas, shows a filigree of white arabesques that trace the labyrinthine root pattern of the desert plant... and so much more. The artist's much quoted statement about the subject of her art was that it depicted "Whole lot, that's all, whole lot; awelye, arlatyeye, ankerrthe, ntange, dingo, ankerre, intekwe, anthwerte and kame (my dreaming, pencil yam, mountain devil lizard, grass seed, dingo, emu, small plant emu food, green bean and yam seed). That's what I paint: whole lot."

Whichever individual or institution possesses the 'whole lot' needed to purchase Yam Dreaming at auction from Hank Ebes on 18 March 2012 will surely be one of the season's hot topics among Australian art aficionados.

Cultural Theft?

When is aesthetic appropriation a felony?

Or worse yet, an act of cultural imperialism?

The Fall 2012 Rodarte line by fashionista favorites Kate and Laura Mulleavy raises those questions for Clemantine Bastow, fashion writer for WA today. The new line, according to the Mulleavy sisters, is 'outback' in inspiration with dresses featuring dot painting patterns derived from contemporary Aboriginal art.

In a column titled 'Cultural Theft,' Bastow cringes at this appropriation. She quotes with approval another blogger, Julia of à l’allure garçonnière: "I don't think the issue of institutional racism and discrimination can be completely divorced from the question of cultural appropriation. They feed into one another [...] Reducing an entire culture to a simple ‘inspiration’ for your outfit, art project, fashion collection, or photo-shoot is disrespectful and unhelpful, especially when we look at the bigger picture.”

What, exactly, is that bigger picture, though? For Bastow, looking at the creative method employed by Kate and Laura Mulleavy, it's the problem of borrowing "whichever forms of traditional and contemporary Indigenous Australian art they thought looked cool" without ever having visited Australia, and stripped of the turbulent context of Aboriginal history. "That they mixed the prints with Victorian-inspired silhouettes, recalling the time in Australian history when Indigenous people weren’t actually considered citizens, only increases the ironic sting of the designers’ appropriation…. Evidently they are so unable to piece together an outfit without resorting to cultural appropriation that even suggesting it might be hurtful to people of those cultures is too much to bear." As someone who has criticized Aboriginal art rip-offs in this blog, I believe the issue of cultural theft is important. But in the case of the Rodarte runway confections, I think the accusation is well off the mark - and implicitly patronizing to the Aboriginal people it purports to benefit.

By way of explanation, let's consider for a moment a couture innovation that helped define the look of the '70s: Yves Sant Laurent's "Russian collection" of 1976. Its luxe cultural concoction evoked Slavic peasants in holiday attire, cossack cavalry amazons, gypsy fortunetellers, and a late-night raid on the Ballets Russes wardrobe room. Sant Laurent's bold departure from space-age fabrics and minimalist shapes romped across cultural histories and geographies, borrowing and synthesizing with purposeful abandon.

Exemplars from Sant Laurent's epochal collection can be found in the Victoria & Albert in London and the Metropolitan Museum in New York. Given Sant Laurent's earlier output, it is impossible to say that he was "unable to piece together an outfit without resorting to cultural appropriation." Are these objects artifacts of cultural theft? Russian peasants, of course, were subjected to collectivization and mass starvation in the dreadful Soviet 1930s. Is this delirious mash-up of peasant folk traditions "hurtful to people of those cultures?"

I don't think so, not given the clarity of the techniques of collage and sampling involved in Sant Laurent's Russian collection - the same techniques explicit in the Rodarte collection. To say that these modes of aesthetic production are legitimate when applied to European cultural sources, but redolent of "institutional racism and discrimination" when applied to contemporary indigenous sources disrespects the latter by implying a fragility requiring 'special treatment,' perhaps as a sort of cultural protectorate.

Conversely, one can see the Rodarte line's unexpected hybridization of contemporary Aboriginal painting patterns and Edwardian silhouettes as inspired - and inspirational - in its own way. One can imagine these garments as couture's version of what academics call 'counterfactual history' - expressions of an imagined material culture of an Australia in which the colonial and indigenous heritage not only co-exist but also cross-pollinate. The Rodarte line challenges us to envision social hybridity yielding a culturally synthetic standard of beauty applied to the body as a second skin. Given that Kate and Laura Mulleavy were capable of suggesting such a provocative scenario without ever having visited Australia, they deserve a round of applause rather than a reflexive cultural cringe.

Epilogue: 1 April 2012

The Rodarte dust-up took a week to reach to oven temperature, and another to deflate like a collapsed souffle.

The added heat came courtesy of Dr. Megan Davis of the University of New South Wales Indigenous Law Centre. Dr. Davis went public with her accusation that the Rodarte line was the product of cultural theft: "As an Aboriginal lawyer I found the designs offensive, particularly when you keep in mind the abject poverty that a lot of these groups live in in mostly remote Australia. The thought of seeing women walking around in this particular ready-to-wear collection sickens me, because it is my culture and it is where I come from." She added: "It is completely insensitive to Aboriginal art and spirituality and the land and how they are inextricably linked. The [Mulleavy] sisters admit they have never been to Australia, so they must have had 'inspiration' from books, images, web, or Aboriginal art, including 60,000 year old rock art. A clan's songlines, story, life, and very essence, with responsibilities and reciprocal obligations to the land and kin are all part of a religious Aboriginal system of knowledge and there are cultural responsibilities for the protection and use of those images as well as custodial obligations."

Uncomfortably for Dr. Davis, one of the responsibilities for the protection and use of her knowledge - due diligence - went lacking in her statement. As Jeremy Eccles of Aboriginal Art News revealed in "Aboriginal Art Dress Spat," his response to Dr. Davis' critique, the Mulleavy sisters had applied to the Aboriginal Artists' Agency (AAA), the licensing representative of Papunya Tula Artists, and had properly licensed their use of all indigenous motifs used in their new Fall line. More damning still was the AAA representative Anthony Wallace's statement that "The widow of the artist Benny Tjangala will see this use of his artworks quite differently to the professor," and would "appreciate the royalty flow over the next twelve months." The Mulleavy sisters, in other words, had behaved admirably both in terms of securing permission for the use of the motifs and reimbursing indigenous Australians for the privilege.

Alice Springs outlaws Todd Mall's Aboriginal Art Street Vendors

Bob Gosford, writing for the Australian news-blog Crikey, reports that the Alice Springs city council has outlawed unlicenced Aboriginal art vendors on Todd Mall, the town's pedestrian main street. As usual, the blog nails the story with one of its typically Larrikin headlines: "Council bans Aboriginal street artists: racist or just dumb?" A false binary if there ever was one, since the council's decision is both.

In a letter to the Alice Springs News, local citizen John Bermingham explained exactly why, with respect to both tourism and Australian race relations, the council's action is so, well .... stupid. Bermingham's visiting nieces, aged 8 and 11, stopped to talk to an elderly Aboriginal artist on Todd Mall and to buy a painting:

"They sat with him while he explained the painting (honey ants, waterholes, meeting places) and also had their photo taken with him. It was only a small purchase ($30) but it was a priceless experience for them.

"They paid for the painting from their own spending money.

"When they returned to school, they spoke about meeting the old man to their class, showed photos and their painting … now the youngest is studying Aboriginal history in her class. Meeting and buying art from Aboriginal artists in the mall is a unique attraction for visitors to Alice Springs and we should be promoting it, not banning it."

What may now disappear from the Alice Springs visitor experience is the opportunity to approach an Aboriginal citizen in a relaxed, unmediated setting to have a conversation about indigenous culture. It is difficult to exaggerate how unusual this experience is for a visitor, who is typically conveyed through a touristic infrastructure of hotels, car rentals, restaurants and shopping stripped of any interaction with Aboriginal people. If  a 200 dollar a day street vending license is required of artists, as planned by the city council, exposure to Aboriginal art and culture will be limited to consumer transactions within galleries and as an audience experience at staged commercial displays of indigenous culture.

There's still hope of an intervention, though. As Gosford points out, the legal definition of public space may not apply to the lawn in front of the John Flynn church where most artists set up shop. As readers of the Crikey article point out, this would be a perfect time for someone with experience in these matters to offer a little pro-bono assistance. 

Is there a lawyer in the house?

Australia's Oldest Painting?

A rock art painting at a site rediscovered two years ago in southwest Arnhem Land could be a depiction of Genyornis, an extinct megafauna species similar to the Emu, but three times as tall. The painting's detail of the bird's parrot-like beak - a characteristic feature of the Genyornis that is utterly unlike its Emu ancestor - is a key piece of the evidence. If the painting is indeed a representation of the largest bird that ever lived, it should be about 40,000 years old, when Genyornis was made extinct as Aboriginal peoples progressively cleared land by setting fires. This would make the painting Australia's oldest, as well as the world's oldest painting found outside a cave.

Other Arnhem Land rock art galleries have yielded images of a variety of extinct species, including Palorchestes, a large Tapir-like animal, and Thylacenes, the "Tasmanian Tiger." Images found last year in the Kimberly, in Western Australia, are now accepted by scientists to be depictions of Thylacoleo carnifexin, an extinct marsupial lion. 

The relatively unprotected location of the Arnhem Land painting has generated controversy regarding its date and subject matter, however. Gavin Prideaux, a paleontologist at Flinders University, believes that the image probably represents the extinct megafauna species, but Robert Bedarnik of the International Federation of Rock Art Organizations questions the existence of any painting over 10,000 years old located anywhere other than the protected environment of a cave surface. 

Archaeologist Ben Gunn, contracted by the Aboriginal Jawoyn Association to conduct research at the painting site, points out that the details of the painting demonstrate an intimate degree of knowledge incapable of being transmitted generationally by storytelling traditions, and that a few feet away from the disputed rendering are those of other extinct species, including a megafauna kangeroo, a Tasmanian tiger and a giant echidna. "Either the painting is 40,000 years old, which is when science thinks the Genyornis disappeared, or alternatively Genyornis lived a lot longer than science has been able to establish.

Either way, the discovery gives the evolving tradition of Arnhem Land painting a new depth and excitement.

Life Imitates Art: Aboriginal Australia Gets a Supermodel

Samantha Harris, whose mother was a 'stolen generation' child and whose father is German, is slated to become Aboriginal Australia's first global supermodel. 

Still a teenager (no surprise) her career is being closely managed by her agency to avoid overexposure.

After a highly publicized appearance on the catwalk in Sydney, she is moving to Manhattan (no surprise) to develop a promising transatlantic career.

Did I mention that she's rail-thin? Surprise!

US News: The (protracted) Rise of Aboriginal Art

It can only be regarded as good news when contemporary Aboriginal art makes the cover of an American art journal. A detail from Shorty Lungkarta Tjungurrayi's 1974 painting Punyurrpungkunya presides over the headline "The Rise of Aboriginal Art" on May 2010 issue of Art News. Which is good news for those of us for whom the US is a something of a desert isle when it comes to Western Desert art.

"Icons of the Desert," the 2009 traveling exhibition of early Papunya boards from the Barbara and John Wilkerson collection, was a welcome departure from our Aboriginal art drought, and it is the focus of the Art News cover story. When I saw the show at UCLA's Fowler Museum last August - in fact, the first thing I did after moving from Sydney to Berkeley last year - the Wilkerson's works (which include the legendary Water Dreaming at Kalipinypa by Johnny Warangkula Tjupurrula) was coupled with more recent canvases drawn from the extensive holdings of LA collector Richard Kelton. The Art News article establishes a context for "Icons of the Desert" by outlining the familiar Geoffrey Bardon story, the first American exhibitions of the 1980s, the skyrocketing prices of early Papunya boards in the '90s, and ends with a hat tip to Emily Kame Kngwarreye. 

What's wrong with this story? Nothing, if you know next to nothing about Indigenous Australian art. But for anyone who has been following the only art movement of international importance to ever emerge from Australia, it is a sad affirmation of America's underdeveloped appreciation of this indigenous cultural Renaissance. Contemporary, with regard to Western Desert art, seems to mean the 1970s in the US, where "The Rise of Aboriginal Art" is happening in agonizingly slow motion. 

Our aesthetic retardation feeds a vicious circle that keeps contemporary Aboriginal art out of sight, thus out of mind, and further hinders its emergence into American cultural consciousness. The Manhattan real estate career of Suzun Bennet, as recently reported in the Epoch Times, illustrates the point. Ms Bennet, a well-heeled Australian, moved to New York in 2001 to be closer to her daughter. She arrived in the Big Apple with a mission: she would devote her efforts to "establishing a footprint for Aboriginal art in the US." And what would be a better beachhead for this effort than Manhattan, a global art capital generously seeded with wealthy, cultured, acquisitive collectors? Recounting this stillborn plan, Ms. Bennet mused: "I met a lot of arts people, but I found it hard to introduce a genre that wasn't contextualized here." After four years of effort - and during the most breathtaking expansion of disposable income ever seen in Manhattan - Ms. Bennet called it quits, repatriated an extensive stockpile of art back to Australia, took the real estate licensing exam, and became an agent.

When Americans aren't able to see contemporary Aboriginal art (or more than a 1970s snapshot of it) there's little chance that gallery owners, collectors or museum curators - the forces that power our arts infrastructure - will appropriately value Western Desert art in any sense of the word.

Here's how the situation plays itself out in public cultural institutions. When I returned to the US from Australia in 2009, I landed stateside with a great idea and the gung-ho energy to shop it around. If American art museums suffered from anemic Western Desert art holdings, why not galvanize a local collectors to endow their home institutions with a selection of the best that private troves could provide? Answer: because museum curators didn't want it - any of it. An art dealer warned me that he'd had a client with a respectable collection who wanted to donate the best of it to a major West-coast modern art museum. They couldn't get the curators interested. As it turned out, none of my e-mails to local curators - friends of my art history colleagues in Sydney - produced a response either. 

Before I'm accused of being a complete pessimist, let me say that the problem isn't insurmountable, just obstinate. The best hope for a solution still resides with alliances of enlightened collectors and curators committed to bringing the dazzling artifacts of Australia's indigenous Renaissance to American eyes. The Wilkersons, helped by Australian art historian Roger Benjamin, have done the public a remarkable service with their "Icons of the Desert" show. I owe them a debt of gratitude for making possible my repeat encounters with Tjupurrula's Water Dreaming at Kalipinypa, without a doubt one of the 20th century's most mesmerizing works on canvas. See it, and you'll understand why John Wilkerson calls it his Mona Lisa, still mysterious after fifteen years of viewing at close quarters.

And the next great public/private collaboration is taking shape in Seattle, where curator Pam McClusky is preparing a trove of works collected by Margaret and Bob Levy for a 2011 show slated to travel to major venues across the US. For those of us who appreciate Western Desert visions more recent than those of the 1970's, that's good news indeed. 

Today's Aboriginal Art Rip-off

With apologies to the Spinifex Arts Project - "Spinifex Pink - Australian Aboriginal Fabric." 

"Seeing Stories" at Colorado College I.D.E.A. Space

Parallels between Outsider Art and contemporary Aboriginal art were explored in "Seeing Stories," a March 2010 exhibition at the I.D.E.A. Space gallery at Colorado College in Colorado Springs. As noted in my post on the Aboriginal landscape paintings of Billy Benn Perrurle, below, art historian Colin Rhodes maintains that Western Desert art is subsumed under the broader category of Oustider Art, in that its artists are untrained in formal traditions of Western modernism, are not explicitly concerned with contributing to its canon, and as marginalized subjects of colonial occupation were excluded from its social, economic and cultural mainstream.

"Seeing Stories" may well be the first art exhibition to cast its net so broadly across works of art usually segregated into alternate categories. Five distinct bodies of work were on display: linocut prints by the Namibian artist John Muafangejo, so-called 'ledger drawings' by Native American artists (drawn on the lined paper of turn-of-the-century ledger books), paintings by the self-taught Southern artist Mose Tolliver, panoramic fantasies by Henry Darger depicting the adventures of the "Vivian Girls," the child heroines of his unpublished and unpublishable novel (150,000 manuscript pages of it) about Christian princesses on a quest to vanquish an evil empire, and fourteen early Papunya paintings  culled from the collection of Harold Burch.

Aside from making available the kind of works often admired but rarely seen in larger galleries, what does such a shotgun-wedding of art categories offer to exhibition audiences? In short, the opportunity to shake and break preconceptions about contemporary art and its makers. 

The contemporary art establishment, from the grassroots level of art schools and small galleries to the collectors, dealers and curators who populate its stratosphere, is still largely organized into the ranks and by the rules that congealed around a modernist avant-garde over a century ago.  Works were valued for their ability to cross a threshold, envisioning the experiences of a new common era - that of modernism. 

Outsider Art is unruly in a way different from that of a modernist avant-garde. It abjures the notion of a shared Zeitgeist. It has much more in common with the notion of "contemporary art" as conceptualized by art historian Terry Smith. As the name suggests, "contemporaneity" differs from "modernity" in proposing multiple time streams that can overlap and collide, but which also maintain discrete characteristics, rather than fusing into the expression of a homogeneous modernity.

"Seeing Stories" presents fragments that force us as viewers to recompose the modern world as a mosaic of parallel worlds. Industrialization and its mass production of colored pencils and cheap ledger books is revealed as a medium allowing Native Americans to record their lives. In the work of Henry Darger, coloring books steeped in maudlin sentiment provide image templates for pseudo-historical battle scenes pitting warriors against naked children. And in the now legendary account of the origins of Western Desert painting at Papunya, a well-intentioned grade school teacher's attempt to get children to draw from their own culture proved a catalyst for an indigenous Renaissance led by Aboriginal elders.  

Tjukurpa Pulkatjara at the Adelaide Festival

Oh, to be in Adelaide in March!

In conjunction with the Adelaide Festival, the city's South Australian Museum is sponsoring Tjukurpa Pulkatjara, an exhibition featuring a who's who of contemporary aboriginal art. Jimmy Baker, Maringka Baker, Wingu Tingima, Tommy Mitchell, Tjaparti Bates, Carol Maayatja Golding, Myra Yurtiwa Cook, Harry Tjutjuna, Tiger Palpatja, Ruby Dickinson, Dickie Minyintiri... and even more, amazingly. Some of these artists will be there to discuss their work. The painting shown is Jimmy Baker's 2008 Ngintaka, Kalaya, Wanampi.

This is one of the greatest showings of the works of senior Western Desert artists to be unveiled this (or any other) year.

According to the Museum, "Tjukurpa Pulkatjara celebrates the work of artist who live and paint close to the Tjukurpa [dreaming] at community art centers. The exhibition underlines the importance of provenance and ethical acquisition of works."

And for those who like their Dreaming art performed as well as painted, the festival also presents Liru Tjukurpa, the Rainbow Serpent Story, as rendered by Carclew Youth Arts of Ernabella. The performance has a profound significance: it represents the generational continuity of indigenous art and knowledge as handed down from community elders to its youth.

Oh, to be in Adelaide in March!

From 4 through 16 March 2010, 10 AM - 5 PM

South Australian Museum

North Terrace, Adelaide SA

Outback Outsider: Billy Benn Perrurle at NG Art Gallery

The similarities between the Wandjina by Lily Karada, left, and the painting of an Ancient King by the self-taught African-American artist Richard Burnside, right, are more than merely superficial. Karada's Wandjina is a figure from the dreamtime and is ritually painted at ancient sites by Mowanjum people to ensure the cyclical arrival of monsoon rains. Burnside paints kings in a ritual allowing him to "find relief" from "night visions of ancient times." Beyond this coincidental overlapping of collective and personal dreamings, both works can be seen as "outsider art," at least as the term is defined by Colin Rhodes, a professor of art history and theory at the University of Sydney and author of Outsider Art: Spontaneous Alternatives.

"The artist outsiders," Rhodes writes, "are, by definition, fundamentally different to their audience, often thought of being dysfunctional in respect to the parameters of normality set by the dominant culture. What this means specifically is, of course, subject to changes dictated by history and geographical location." Burnside's unschooled technique, production of images to exorcise unwanted spiritual companions, and marginal status within the dominant American society qualifies him as an "outsider" artist on multiple levels. Aboriginal peoples can also be seen as outsiders, given "a post-colonial situation in which the colonizer has become 'naturalized' and speaks with the dominant cultural voice." Contemporary Aboriginal art, ranging from Western Desert works representing indigenous dreamings using non-traditional media to works "that reveal Australian history as seen from the Aboriginal perspective, from pre-European life to politically charged images of institutionalized racism," all qualify as creative artifacts of an outsider perspective, as Rhodes defines it.

The exhibit of works by Billy Benn Perrurle, To Paint Every Hill at NG Art Galley in Chippendale (Sydney), showcases the signature landscapes of the most celebrated Aboriginal outsider artist. Born in 1943 in Artetyerre (Harts Range), he labored from childhood in mica mines and later became a drover. In 1967, Perrurle shot and killed a man, and for the next two weeks evaded the police, shooting and wounding two officers. Acquitted by reason of insanity, he ended up in Alice Springs, eventually working in the sheet metal shop of the Bindi Centre, a service provider for the developmentally disabled. He began painting on discarded pieces of plastic and plywood in a corner of the shop around 1980, depicting his mother's and grandfather's country with delicate, intricate brushstrokes. These small landscapes, unschooled in technique and created out personal need rather than for financial gain, conform to the understood criteria of outsider art.

Discovered by the mainstream art market at the 2000 Desert Mob exhibition, Perrurle has since become a major figure with works acquired by the National Gallery of Australia, The Art Gallery of New South Wales and the National Gallery of Victoria. As the 2006 winner of the coveted Alice Prize, where a plaque beside his premiated work announced: "He wants to paint every hill from his country and then he will stop, then he will return home," Perrurle has well and truly arrived.

Perrurle's painting Harts Range/Alice Range in the NGA collection (above), created around 1997, depicts his birthplace from memory. Its representational language is both familiar and strange. Hills rise in oleaginous swirls toward a sky that is blue, yet ominously dark. An incongruously bright stand of trees leaps from the foreground, then dissolves into the murky distance.

As an Aboriginal landscape painting executed in non-traditional media and iconography, it poses the same intriguing questions raised by the watercolors of Albert Namatjira - and indeed, Perrurle admires Namatjira as a "great painter." As noted by Alison French in the excellent exhibition catalogue Seeing the Centre, Namatjira may have employed techniques and an iconography shared with non-Aboriginals, but his relationship to the landscape he painted remained proprietary and inaccessible. He almost never spoke of his 'Dreaming place,' but his works mapped it in ways ignored by collectors. Arnhem Land painter Galarrwuy Yunupingu maintains that "he was painting his country, the land of the Arrernte people.... No one asked him the name of the name of the country he was painting, or the Dreamings that made that country important.... The buyers did not recognize the Aboriginal law which bound him to the land that he painted." Perrurle's paintings appeal to a broader group of collectors than more "orthodox" Western Desert art, with its iconography of dotted roundels and arcane symbols. Yunupingu warns us that, in terms of fundamental meaning, Perrurle's works may be equally inscrutable; their readings as realist representation merely the product of a deluded eye and a lazy mind.

Perrurle's work changed a few years ago after he revisited the country of his birth, the site of the tumultuous events of his early life. Brushstrokes gained gestural strength, his color palette brightened, mountain profiles took on a vivid, mannerist grandeur. Perrurle's landscapes seem to have emerged from the haze of memory into an insistent, almost hallucinogenic presence. The speed at which he paints has also increased. A cynic might explain this as reality of a hungry market for his paintings making itself felt: a common trajectory in the 'post discovery' career of American outsider artists like Jimmy Lee Sudduth. But another explanation for this outpouring of landscape visions is also likely, as noted in the caption of Perrurle's Alice Prize-winning painting: "He wants to paint every hill from his country and then he will stop, then he will return home." Perrurle's iconic fragments of country may be the products of a idiosyncratic ritual still in flux, the evocative byproducts of an outsider's personal dreaming.

Today's aboriginal art rip-off

"Illustration of Aboriginal Style Background" priced by the pixel. Looks to be an emu e-dreaming.

Balgo at Red Dot Gallery

Kinti kinti, Purrka purrka - The Balgo Way - inaugurates the newly relocated Red Dot Gallery in Singapore. It features paintings ranging from subtly modulated fields of color with gentle interjections of form, like Imelda (Yukenbarri) Gugaman's Winpurpurla (left) to the chromatic electrical currents recorded on canvas by Geraldine Nowee, Elizabeth Gordon, David Mudgedell, Lady Gordon and Helicopter Tjungurrayi.

The Red Dot installation showcases a number of works of great interest in terms of the development and transformation of techniques associated with Balgo art. Kunawarritji, a work by Eubena Nampitjin (below), shows continuities with the painterly style she has developed since abandoning dotting for brushwork in the mid-90s under the encouragement of arts centre coordinator James Cowan. With this canvas, Nampitjin also moves away from the polychrome linear pattern that organizes many of her works. Gone as well is the iconographic representation of a water soak as a contrasting central spot that gathers the entire composition within its field of gravity - a principle seen in the work of many Balgo artists. Instead, Nampitjin's numinous blur of yellow and pink brushwork assumes center stage, creating a sense of effulgent, receding space. Turner comes to mind: particularly his Glaucus and Sylla, with its luminous ocean of mist.

The paintings shown by Balgo artists in Singapore represent an extravagant range of strengths and talents. Miriam Baadjo contributes two works in which protoplasmic forms seem to writhe beneath their veil of fine white dotting. Pauline Sunfly's Litjin conveys a dreaming associated with her father's country with stark, totemic force. Graham Gordon's Wilkinkarra presents a dingo dreaming through elegant monochrome arabesques. All in all, quite a show, and an auspicious housewarming for Red Dot's new digs.

Papunya Tula Artists Conquer Germany!

A traveling exhibition of works by Papunya Tula artists has just ended a successful tour of galleries in Frankfurt, Stuttgart, Berlin and Freiburg. Artkelch gallery of Freiburg organized the events, attended by over 5000 visitors. The series of shows was the first in an exhibition concept that German-Australian gallery owner Robyn Kelch calls "Pro Community." By creating an annual event that features works from a single Aboriginal art center and exhibits them a in cities across Germany, Artkelch has devised an innovative business model that supports the gallery's mission "to inform and enlighten (Europeans) about the culture and conditions of Aboriginals in Australia's recent history." This is especially important in Germany, Switzerland and Austria, where contemporary Western Desert art has begun to open eyes and minds, but still "is often categorized as indigenous folk art or handicraft," according to Kelch. In the service of both collectors and artists Artklech promotes knowledge about ethical practices of artistic production and distribution - in other words, a model enterprise.

Among the outstanding works displayed (and, for the most part, sold) during Papunya Tula's storming of Germany, the most memorable for me is one by Tjunkiya Napaltjarri (shown). A remarkable innovator, she abandoned the conventional western desert dotting technique for one in which the acrylic paint was instead pushed across the canvas in nervous, jagged strokes. When combined with bold graphics, her signature technique gave canvases a raw, almost feral edginess. The piece unveiled posthumously in Frankfurt opening is singular, integrating the linear and concentric motifs that alternated in her late work. Its harmonious composition exudes confidence and joy - and it comes as no surprise that the piece, which feels like the culminating work of her late career, sold on opening night.

Of course, the opening at Berlin's Artbar 71, co-sponsored by the Australian embassy, proved why the city got its postwar reputation as a breath of fresh air in nose-to-the-grindstone Germany. I wonder where the patron with the leather gear was headed after the opening. On the other hand, some things probably are better left unasked....

Cliff Reid Astounds

I've been smitten with the work of Cliff Reid ever since my first exposure at the 2008 Desert Mob exhibition in Alice Springs. Nicholas Rothwell, observer of Aboriginal life and art for The Australian, pronounced Reid's Desert Mob submission "perhaps the single most arresting piece in the show," and assessed exactly why:

...his work possesses the hierarchic strength of Pintupi masterpieces of the early 1970s, when the underpinnings of desert men's paintings lay close to the surface of their work.

Examine some of the early Papunya boards shown at the recent Icons of the Desert show, and Rothwell's comment seems indisputable. At the same time, Reid's visceral language of form seems to predate Western Desert painting, springing from ancient traditions of shield and shell carving.

Given the totemic potency of Reid's canvases, it may surprise admirers to discover that the artist is a devout Christian. His early childhood was spent in the bush leading a largely nomadic life. He briefly attended a mission school at Warburton, and as an adult lived with this second wife, Ruby, at Blackstone. In 2003, Reid began to paint with Papulankutja artists. Two of his sons, Thomas Reid and Carlton Isaac Reid are also painters, the former using figuration closely related to his father's representational works, the latter painting in a bold, graphic style recalling his father's geometric works.

The National Gallery of Victoria made its first accession of a canvas by Reid in 2008. Reid's most recent solo show was at Melbourne's William Mora gallery in August 2009. Check out the series collectively titled "Tingari," which can only be described as the work of a master. These compelling paintings celebrate a profound connection to a community and its homeland, a bond now attenuated by Reid's hospitalization in Alice Springs, where he is being treated for renal failure. Despite this turn of events, the artist's religious faith and love for the land are stronger than ever, as he declared in a recent interview with the Australian Broadcasting network. He has our prayers for a speedy recovery and return to his family and beloved country.

Today's aboriginal art rip-off

Thinking of making this a regular feature of this blog - so much great, depressing material out there on e-bay....

Sacred desert gift paper?

Words fail....

Mutant Message Goes Intergalactic

Even a science-fiction hater would have to admit that Avatar, James Cameron's latest box-office juggernaut, is one clever vehicle. When was the last time a film exploring the profit-driven dispossession of indigenous peoples captivated a global audience?

In interviews, Cameron clarified that the Na'vai tribe of his fictional planet, Pandora, are a composite of various indigenous people and cultures from around the globe. Although the Na'vai environment is a rainforest, their spiritual connection to country will ring familiar if you're attuned to the history of the first Australians. And the terrestrial mercenaries' war room warning of "hordes of Aboriginals" massing for attack will evoke some rather specific images.

In a New York Times op-ed piece titled "The Messiah Complex," conservative columnist David Brooks condemns Cameron's film as rehashed pablum: yet another saga about a white adventurer who, after discovering that the natives are "noble and spiritual and pure" turns into an imported Messiah, "leading them on a righteous crusade against his own rotten civilization." This, according to Brooks, is an imperialist "racial fantasy par excellence." He has a point, as anyone would know who remembers the controversy about Marlo Morgan's literally "incredible adventure story" (as described in its cover blurb), Mutant Message Down Under. First released as a non-fiction vanity publication, later as a new-age novel, Morgan's book traces her walkabout trek from an unnamed city on Australia's West coast to an unnamed city on the East coast after being kidnapped by a group of Aboriginals calling themselves the Real People. Excruciatingly written, featuring characters (including that of the American author) rendered with all of the nuance of cardboard cutouts, the book outraged first Australians with its unwittingly defamatory assertions. In learning the magical ways of her captors, for example, Morgan explains why Aboriginal cannibalism is noble, how to heal compound fractures overnight with fermented menstrual blood, and that the last people of the outback consigned themselves to extinction through the purposeful practicing of celibacy. By the end of her tale, Morgan is back in the US showing off her newly learned Aboriginal ability to become invisible at will. This really is an imperialist "racial fantasy par excellence."

As for Brooks' dismissal of Avatar, what seems to really have his knickers in a twist are Cameron's none-too-subtle references to a rapacious military-industrial complex. And here too, Cameron's points of reference range the globe. His story of indigenous peoples being displaced in a cataclysmic strip mining scheme certainly resonates with Australian experiences at sites like Nhulunbuy and the Ranger 3 mine near Jabiru, where the wholesale demolition of expropriated land is so panoramic in scale that it leaps from satellite images. The story of groups like the Martu and those now known as the Spinifex people also come to mind, rounded up from their ancestral lands and dumped into camps so to make way for a rocket range in the former case and a nuclear test site in the latter. Given these historical realities, Cameron's "imperialist fantasy' is, if anything, too saccharine in its happy ending to convey the brutality directed at terrestrial indigenous peoples even within living memory.

But Brooks is at his most obtuse when refusing even to consider why contemporary audiences would flock to what he derides as an exercise in crude, rude escapism. Avatar rehearses the plot devices of works like Robinson Crusoe, Pocahontas and Dances With Wolves because these stories resonate with us. They help us imagine a world in which commodity value is not the dominant religion, and in which individuals establish their status in society as custodians rather than consumers. And since we have wandered so very far from those values in our everyday life, our path into this alternate reality must be through the eyes of one of our own kind. What Brooks dismisses as "racial fantasy" is instead a tool for empathy. It may be hackneyed, but its what we've got, and we're better off for it.