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.

A Visit to the Met

From the offerings on display in Manhattan's wine shops and museums, it would seem that Australia hardly exists for New Yorkers. I just returned from a long weekend in the city. Invited by friends to have dinner at their Soho loft, I dashed into a mid-town liquor store for wine and was confronted by a shelf lined with bottles of 'Yellow Tail,' a blended Aussie plonk peculiar to the US market. Perusing listings of the city's galleries, I couldn't find a single one offering anything other than a smattering of generic works of Western Desert art. And so it was with the city's museums as well. Paris, Utrecht, Milan, Amsterdam - all of them have museums or galleries boasting significant collections of Western Desert art. In America's cultural capital, at least this time around, the only game in town was the Metropolitan Museum of Art's untitled and unadvertised showing of 14 canvases belonging to unnamed private collectors. The works are on display in a museum hallway connecting the Oceanic and modern art collections through 12 June.

The Met's show, as noted in Jeremy Eccles' post in Aboriginal Art News, is part of a trend in which private collectors of contemporary Aboriginal art sponsor public exhibitions of their holdings. Last year's Icons of the Desert, a traveling exhibition of early Papunya boards and canvases owned by John and Barbara Wilkinson, showed how this practice can provide a opportunity for cultural diplomacy, scholarly symposia, the publication of a catalogue containing high-quality reproductions and critical essays, and increased public exposure to Australia's brilliant contribution to modernism.

By contrast, the Met's exercise in public-private collaboration seems more like an exercise in valorizing - in both the symbolic and monetary senses - a selection of paintings owned by an anonymous collector. This impression results, in part, from the ensemble of works on display. Unlike the Wilkersons' focused and carefully-strategized collection, the Met's exhibit showcases a grab-bag of works from 2000-2007. A single exception, Antjari Tjakamarra's work "Sons and Orphans near Kurlkurta" dates from 1984. While each of the works is adequately captioned, little attempt has been made to place these paintings in a collective context. The resulting impression is that of a "greatest-hits" anthology, a selection of highly-collectable works representing some of Australia's best known contemporary Aboriginal painters, but one that short sells the movement by neglecting to educate its audience.

Perhaps I should be grateful simply to have been able to see works by Jean Baptiste Aputimi, Patty Bedford, Lorna Fencer, Elizabeth Nyumi, Freddy Timms, Daniel Walbidi and Judy Watson in a city that is a desert with regard to Western Desert art (if you'll forgive the pun). But I can't help but compare the widespread lack of appreciation for this genre of modernism to that confronting the collectors of European avant-garde art a century ago. If we all know the names Picasso and Matisse today, it is largely through the public education efforts of collectors and curators.

Currently, the Seattle Art Museum is assembling a major exhibition of works owned by Margaret Levi and Bob Kaplan: a show that promises not only to introduce American audiences to the rich panorama of contemporary Australian indigenous art, but also to help visitors understand the context of these works within a landscape alive with ancestral presences and galvanized by political struggles for self-determination. Until then, brave those "little town blues" to enjoy the grab-bag of works on display in the cultural provinces of New York, New York.

The Summer Show: McCulloch's Aboriginal Art at Salt Contemporary

The quaint waterfront village of Queenscliff, Victoria, a Melbourne day-tripper's holiday destination, is playing host to The Summer Show, a Western Desert art exhibition at Salt Contemporary gallery. The curators are Susan McCulloch and Emily McCulloch Childs, the mother and daughter team responsible for McCulloch's Contemporary Aboriginal Art: the complete guide (now in its fourth edition): an indispensable resource for anyone interested in the rapidly changing Western Desert Art movement.

The McCulloch website notes that the team's exhibitions are "designed as a walk through our books," in that showcased works represent a variety of leading aboriginal arts centers, artistic media, and artists ranging from established masters to rising stars. The collection displayed at Salt Contemporary falls somewhat short of this goal by leaning so heavily on artists representing the Utopia region. About one-third of the paintings on display are from Utopia artists, including Gloria Petyarre, Emily and Gayla Pwerle, Barbara Weir and Freddy Purla.

The over-representation of works from Utopia is to be expected, I suppose, given the show's venue. Galleries in resort communities generally play to their predominant market: holiday tourists without much specialized knowledge, generally buying on impulse and more likely to pick up a 'pretty' piece of art than a challenging one. The larger problem with 'resort art,' at least for the consumer, is that it may have a low resale value. Let the buyer beware.

Utopia is one of the few regions of contemporary Aboriginal art production that, for a variety of historical reasons, has no system of art center advisors to manage painting practices or marketing. The downside of this situation is overproduction and lack of quality control. While the Utopia pieces at Salt Contemporary are among the best available, I wouldn't be enthusiastic about paying a gallery price for a piece with dozens of lesser variations available on e-bay. I suspect that most holiday-makers wouldn't either - if they realized the extent of the cottage industry in paintings hailing from Utopia.

The other two-thirds of the McCulloch show, however, fulfills the curators' promise to take gallery visitors on a tour through the pages of their guide to contemporary Aboriginal art. Art centers like Papunya Tula, Martumili, Warlukurlangu, Maruku, Ngurratjuta (Many Hands), Warakurna Artists and Spinifex Arts all find representative works on display.

Among the most challenging - and breath-taking - is a canvas titled Tapurltapurl (shown above) by Martumili's Janice Nixon, also known as Yuwali. As one of the Martu people removed by force from the Western Desert in the interest of Australia's cold war rocket development program, she is the co-author and primary protagonist of Cleared Out: First Contact in the Western Desert, and the focus of Bentley Dean and Martin Butler's feature-length film Contact, winner of the best documentary award at the 2009 Sydney film festival.

Another show-stopper is Urltugun, a painting by Anne Hogan of the Spinifex Arts project. Its swirling composition of sinuous lines and dots centered on a black void representing a desert water source is powerful and hypnotic. It is also wonderful to see the work of Ngurratjuta (Many Hands) art center represented in a bold composition by Emma Daniel Nungurrai entitled Body Paint. The fact that both of these edgy, challenging artworks were among the exhibition's first to sell sends an important signal to galleries, including those in resort towns: although anodyne works may move well on ebay, don't underestimate your audience.

When Imitation isn't a Form of Flattery

Here's another painful rip-off of Aboriginal design: this time to adorn a bong.

How wrong can you get?

Wentja Napaltjarri (2) at Peta Appleyard Gallery

From the catching up department: the Peta Appleyard Gallery in Alice Springs closed 2009 with an impressive exhibition of works by Wentja Napaltjarri (Two). One of the leading artists at Mount Leibig's Watiwayanu Arts center, Wentja Napaltjarri comes from a family of renowned artists. She learned to paint by working with her father, Shorty Lungkata Tjungurrayi, one of the originators of the Western Desert art movement and a founding member of Papunya Tula artists. Her sisters are also important artists in their own right: Linda Syddick, Wentja Napaltjarri (one), and the late Tjunkayia Napaltjarri. Living at Mt. Leibig, Wentja Napaltjarri paints with Watiyawanu Arts.

At her first solo show at Coo-ee Gallery in Sydney in 2005, Napaltjarri presented works in a range of techniques, ranging from geometrically arrayed clusters of concentric roundels to representational outlines of blue-tongued lizards. A few canvases explored a softer dotting technique to create broad tonal fields accented by roundels.

The subtle, soft dotting technique yielding patchwork or pulsating fields spread among a number of female artists at Mt. Leibig around 2005-06, including Ngoia Pollard (winner of the 23rd Telstra National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art Award) and Lilly Kelly Napangardi, among others. Napaltjarri's exploration of the technique culminated in a set of paintings shown by Neil Murphy Indigenous Arts in 2006 which were composed entirely of patchwork fields.

Napaltjarri's current show at Peta Appleyard Gallery in Alice Springs showcases new work along with a few canvases of the past five years: a spectrum showing where the artist has been and is currently going. Along with her signature shifting patchwork field paintings accented by a single roundel, other explorations include a hypnotic canvas composed entirely of concentric rings. This strong showing reveals Wentja Napaljarri (Two) to be an artist to watch carefully during future Telstra award ceremonies.

Sally Gabori at Alcaston Gallery

Another opening night near-sellout exhibition, the Sally Gabori show at Melbourne's Alcaston Gallery is proof that the Mornington Island artist's trajectory continues its ascent.

Not all collectors are as enthusiastic about Gabori's pathbreaking work. I remember a gallery opening in Brisbane last year at which the conversation turned to the instant fame of Mornington Island's 85-year-old Wunderkind. "I wouldn't have one of her paintings in my collection, mate" an old-school Aboriginal art collector confided. His problem with Gabori's work was its lack of cultural continuity with any indigenous graphic art tradition. Her painting style is an ideosyncratic invention, its brilliant colors applied right out of the tube and pushed about the canvas in a bravura action painting technique that brings to mind the work of postwar abstract expressionists.

Gabori's career, outlined in an excellent overview titled The Heart of Everything, is no less unexpected. A Kaiadilt native born around 1924 on Bentnick Island in North Queensland's Carpenteria Gulf, Gabori was exiled from her homeland with the rest of her tribal peoples in the 1940s after years of drought and a devastating cyclone. Relocated to Mornington Island to live as an outsider among Lardil and Yangkaak peoples, Gabori picked up a brush for the first time in 2005 while waiting to be given weaving materials at the local Arts and Crafts Centre. After a hesitant start, she began turning out bold compositions unprecedented in Aboriginal painting. Her work found an immediate audience of enthusiasts and quickly entered important private collections (illustrated above: "My Father's Country," 2007, Finalist in the 2007 National Aboriginal and Torres Straits Islander Art Award, now in the Laverty Collection).

Inspired by Gabori's exuberant canvases, a group of familially-related Kaiadilt women artists, including Paula Paul, Netta Loogatha, May Moodoonuthi, Thelma Burke and Emily Evans, has emerged to revitalize indigenous art in Queensland. Their startling formal vocabulary, while eluding traditionalists, underscores a fundamental truth about contemporary Aboriginal art: this is a movement in the literal sense, grounded in the changing modes of expression that characterize any living culture.

New Publication: Bill Whiskey Tjapaltjarri

The eighth volume to be published in the Macmillian Mini-Art Series,

Bill Whiskey Tjapaltjarri adds the first monograph on an Aboriginal artist to a series of small books dedicated to the works of some of the best-known Australian contemporary painters, including Robert Jacks, John Olsen, Melinda Harper, Tim Storrier and Adam Cullen.

Short on text but well-illustrated, the volume includes over seventy paintings, many with images of details. Perusing the inventory of artworks, one can only marvel at the incredible productivity of a career that spanned a mere four years, cut short by his death in August 2008.

Born around 1920 near Pirupa Alka, 130 kms south of the rock monoliths of Kata Tjuta (the Olgas), Tjapaltjarri, saw whites for the first time when his parents migrated to Uluru (Mt. Ayers) in search of food. Discouraged by this first contact, the family moved back to their tribal lands. Upon his father's death, Tjapaltjarri walked to Haasts Bluff, where he met his wife Colleeen Nampitjinpa. Decades later, the Tjapaltjarri family moved to Amunturrngu (Mount Liebig), where the couple were respected Ngangkari (traditional healers). A non-smoking, non-drinking elder, Tjapaltjarri gained the monniker "Whiskey" as a corruption of "Whiskery," an apt description of his strikingly framed face.

While his wife Colleen had a long history of painting, Tjapaltjarri put paint to canvas for the first time in 2004. Within two years critics hailed him as one of Australia's most important emerging artists.

With the exception of a series of small works called "the boards project," all of Tjapaltjarri's canvases bore the same title: "Rockholes Around the Olgas." His works envisage the landscape of permanent water holes and the streaming sheets of rainy-season waters feeding them through the prism of the ancestral cockatoo dreaming of his birthplace. Said to be the only painter to have represented this particular origin myth, Tjapaltjarri deployed the familiar acrylic dotting technique to produce dense fields punctuated with the concentric roundel of rockholes, linear streams indicating water flows and paths of travel, and chromatic patches that have been interpreted as the fields of wildflowers that erupt across the desert after a rainy winter. For Western viewers, Tjapaltjarri's heroically-scaled works also suggest the cosmos and our own cultural iconography for galaxies and comets: a dizzying superimposition of impressions that looks down at a map of the land while looking up at one of the stars.

Tjapaltjarri paid homage to his late-life passion by calling himself Bill Whiskey "Mininderi" - "the Painter." With the publication of his first posthumous monograph, Macmillian has recognized his status as one of Australia's greatest contemporary artists. His work is handled by Peta Appleyard Art Gallery, Alice Springs; Japingka Indigenous Fine Art Gallery, Freemantle and Honey Ant Gallery, Sydney and Sunshine Coast.

US breakthrough: Buffalo-Rainbow Serpent Hybrid!

An interesting piece on Aboriginal art getting a toehold in Caspar, Wyoming (of all places)!

Cultural globalization, or a blueprint for postmodern genetic engineering?

These Briefs Stink

Kudos to the Australian Federal government for taking steps to bust fraudulent "aboriginal art" vendors.

Tony Antoniou, the proprietor of the brazenly-titled venture "Australian Dreamtime Creations Ltd." has been held liable for selling bogus Aboriginal artifacts, including paintings shamelessly presented as works by the invented indigenous artist "Ubanoo Brown." As you'll see from the link, even institutions that should have known better were taken in by the scam.

I saw some of these paintings being sold at a stall in Melbourne's Queen Victoria Market a few years ago. They were tawdry things, utterly mass produced in look and utterly superficial in their pretty tackiness. Picking up on my American accent, the vendor took a hard-sell approach with a big canvas, focusing on price point - wildly expensive for the crap that it was - but cheaper than the worst of what could be found in a gallery.

The fake was presented as 'the real deal' - a pitch that was good for a giggle, or so I thought at the time. In retrospect, I should have called the police.

Why take this tourist junk so seriously? Because it undermines one of the most important sources of income available to first Australians living in the central desert.

As Tim Acker notes in "The Place of Art: Livelihoods in Remote Communities," the cost of living in remote corners of Australia is extremely high. Production of art for tourists and the global urban marketplace is one of the only indigenous enterprises that is viable, lifting indigenous people out of poverty, creating a sense of empowerment and self-sufficiency, and establishing cultural continuities between the distant past and future generations. The commodification of Aboriginal culture raises complex questions, but the alternative is exclusive reliance on social welfare and the eradication of communal traditions.

Aboriginal people have created craft objects for the marketplace from the 19th century, some having little relationship to the artifacts of their daily life practices. As long as these were created by Aboriginal peoples, these objects should be considered authentic - even souvenirs can be authentic products of a new material culture rooted in novel economic systems and transactions. But when "Aboriginal" souvenirs are produced by villages in Indonesia, they become weapons of economic destruction, with indigenous outback communities as ground zero.

Keeping Secrets

The editor's page of the January 2010 issue of Artforum explores the aesthetic of "the secret, that willful mode of obfuscation that operates at the very crux of the personal and the public, joining them together while, at the same time, holding them apart."

While Tim Griffin's article focuses on works by two modern Western artists, Marcel Duchamp and Lynda Benglis, his comments recall the complex phenomenon of secrecy in contemporary Aboriginal art.

The representational practice of consciously withholding knowledge from viewers is far more familiar to enthusiasts of Western Desert paintings than to audiences for Western modernism, who expect to be provided with 'full disclosure' of content through critical analysis and biographical narratives revealing the artist's influences and intentions. By contrast, Aboriginal art has often demanded that viewers accept a "black box" of undisclosed content.

Secrecy was not always the norm in Western Desert art, a fact beautifully demonstrated in the traveling American exhibition Icons of the Desert, which just closed in New York (the exhibition website is linked in the headline). When you scan the site's virtual exhibition, you'll note that some frames are blank. The curators conceded to the wishes of aboriginal elders in Australia, whose objections to the revelation of sacred content in early Papunya Tula paintings echoed those of senior Pitjantjatjara and Walpiri men who in 1972 and 1973 were outraged by depictions of artifacts like tjurunga - the so-called 'bull-roarers' used in rituals accessible only to initiates.

Papunya Tula artists quickly devised painterly techniques responding to the fundamental contradiction of their art, now produced for the marketplace, but painted to commemorate a culture demanding initiation prior to full revelation of its content.

Perhaps the most famous work to negotiate this minefield of secrecy and disclosure is John Warangkula Tjupurrla's 1972 masterpiece, Water Dreaming at Kalipinya, illustrated above. Its dense clouds of dots recalls Impressionist pointillism. His dotting almost - but not quite - obliterates secret iconography, allowing the viewer hazy glimpses of the sacred. Tjupurrla's masterful fusion of meticulous draftsmanship and shimmering fields is surely one reason that this painting established a record for the highest price ever paid for a contemporary Aboriginal artwork: $486,500 (Australian) at a Melbourne Sotheby's auction in 2000.

In his 1995 article "The Politics of the Secret," ethnographer Dick Kimber noted that because explanations of secrecy and disclosure in Western Desert art were devised by non-Aboriginal critics, these understandings are speculative. Notions of the function of secrecy in Aboriginal painting could "undoubtedly be refined by the surviving artists if they so desire," Kimber noted. But to date, even the exact nature of secrecy in these painting practices remains withheld from the non-initiated.

What does it mean that Aboriginal art collectors continue pursuing artworks which are purposely inscrutable, denying any fuller understanding of content, intent and aesthetic tradition? In his Artforum article, editor Tim Griffin addresses this issue in relation to contemporary works of Western art which refuse access to artists' personal (rather than collective) secrets.

"It is precisely the unstable yet persistent nature of secrecy that seems richest in artistic potential, Griffin observes. "In fact... a certain withholding of of knowledge is uniquely privileged in practice, and found capable of endowing those stories we do know of art with greater capacity for meaning."

Or, to put it differently, it would seem that metropolitan galleristas of all stripes may need to acquire the techniques of aesthetic contemplation demanded of Aboriginal art lovers for more than 35 years.

More on the Matron's Aboriginal Art Exhibit

A pithy comment regarding the post below, on the Met's important legitimation of contemporary Aboriginal art.

The Matron holds her first Aboriginal art show

New York's grande dame of high culture, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, is having her first contemporary Aboriginal art exhibition - not that she's advertising it or anything.

A Sense of Place

The First Australians developed a comprehensive understanding of topography that allowed them to flourish both physically and spiritually in a landscape that Europeans typically considered 'uninhabitable.' Contemporary Aboriginal art often refers to 'country' in ways that map its spiritual content.

Despite our global mapping technology we still have much to learn from indigenous custodians of the land!

Gallery Link #0003: Red Dot Gallery, Singapore

Red Dot shows a number of nice Papunya Tula pieces at their "Stock Room Show":

Ningura rocks!

I have quite a number of Ningura's PT paintings. Really really good.

Gallery Link #0002 – Tony Bond in Adelaide

I like Tony Bond's Gallery. I bought a number of PT paintings from him.

Gallery Link #0001 – Scott Livesey's Gallery in Melbourne

That's a great start into Aboriginal Art. Scott Livesey's stockroom full of great paintings from Western Desert Artists.

OK. Here we go again!

It's time to revive this blog.