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.