© all rights reserved
The demand for writing about Aboriginal art - like that
for most other art forms - is directly related to the demand
for the work itself. The greater the market for the art, the
more books, exhibition catalogues and articles result. Hence
the wealth of writers about the art of Papunya, west of
Alice Springs in the central desert, while other regional
forms of Aboriginal art typically have just one or two. More
than any other Australian art movement except the Heidelberg
School, Papunya painting sustains what an economist might
think of as a genuine marketplace of ideas.
Also on Australian Humanities Review:
Papunya Stories
Tim Bonyhady
Yet the market, typically, is only partly responsible for
who writes what about Aboriginal art. The way in which
anthropologists acquire expertise through extended fieldwork
is also significant. Most anthropologists pursue this
fieldwork in relation to just one Aboriginal community -
even if they return their again and again. In doing so they
may become part of this community just as it becomes theirs,
both off and on the page.
Arnhem Land exemplifies how most different regions have
their own writer. The art of the Yolngu people from Yirrkala
to Blue Mud Bay in eastern Arnhem Land is the prime terrain
of the anthropologist Howard Morphy. That of the Kunwinjku
people around Oenpelli to the west, who have a very
different language and culture, is the territory of the
anthropologist Luke Taylor. In between - around Ramingining
in central Arnhem Land - is the domain of the arts adviser
and curator Djon Mundine.
This type of territorial demarcation diminishes the chances
of debate, whether over matters of fact or ideas. But just
as competition is no guarantor of good writing, so
monopolies need not be a cause of bad. An art form may have
only one voice but be better served than by several as
demonstrated by the literature on Arnhem Land, from Morphy's
Ancestral Connections(1991) through Taylor's
Seeing the Inside(1996) to Mundine's central
contribution to The Native Born(2000).
One stock recipe for books and exhibition catalogues about
Aboriginal art is to present an assortment of essays by
authors with this regional expertise. The results, on the
whole, are lame. Not only is the geographical coverage of
these books and catalogues necessarily limited but their
essays also typically offer little new. Repeated recycling
blights publishing about Aboriginal art possibly even more
than it mars writing about non-Aboriginal art.
Sylvia Kleinert's and Margo Neale's new Oxford Companion
to Aboriginal Art and Cultureis unprecedented in its
breadth and depth. No other book has presented such an array
of material, both old and new, about Aboriginal art. Its
production in just four years is itself a significant
achievement given the difficulty of coralling academics and
curators, let alone art writers. Its very bulk - eclipsing
the 716-page Oxford Companion to Australian History
edited by Graeme Davison, John Hirst and Stuart Mcintyre in
1998 - is a powerful affirmation of the significance of
Aboriginal culture.
Yet as much as the Aboriginal Companionextends the
cultural landscape, it also flattens it. Organized part
geographically, as well as partly chronologically and
thematically, the Companiondivides Australia into
six regions, each of which receive more or less equal
treatment. The art of Papunya - one of the most remarkable
expressions of Aboriginal culture - consequently looms no
larger than the much more modest products of artists from
Torres Strait. The Companionequally gives little
sense of the many different accounts of Papunya
painting.
The most famous and influential contributor to this rich
literature has been Geoffrey Bardon - the catalyst and, to a
significant extent, also the orchestrator of Papunya
painting in 1971-72. Bardon's pioneering Aboriginal Art
in the Western Desertappeared in 1979, his Papunya
Tula: Art of the Western Desertin 1991. In between and
since he has proved himself a remarkable essayist - more
evocative, even magical, than perhaps any other writer about
Australian art.
Yet Bardon has never had a monopoly on Papunya writing. The
ethnographer Dick Kimber, who was more closely involved with
Papunya painting than any other non-Aborigine through the
1970s, first discussed these 'Mosaics You Can Move' in 1977
and has kept writing ever since. So too, since the early
1980s has an increasing array of other writers, both
Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal. Only the voice of the
original artists remains more or less muted.
Papunya Tula: Genesis and Genius- the catalogue of
the recent exhibition at the AGNSW edited by Perkins and
Hannah Fink - is another big book. But whereas most of the
reproductions in the Companionare poor, the AGNSW
catalogue is one of the most sumptuous Australian art books
ever produced. Just as with the Gallery's Olive Cotton
catalogue earlier this year, so its Papunya Tulais a
triumph of design. The catalogue's photographs are as
compelling as the paintings reproduced. Jon Rhodes' 1974
picture of John Tjakamarra striding through the Kintore
Range in his flash second-hand suit - not unlike The Beatles
on the zebra crossing of Abbey Road four years before - is
just one example.
The catalogue's essays are also unusually original, as well
as consistently informative. In several cases, they too are
imbued with the writer's sense of amazement not just that
the Aborigines of Papunya could have produced such
remarkable art in such an awful, impoverished place but also
that he or she had the good fortune to witness at least part
of this story unfold. Bardon draws on 'a particularly
cherished memory' in his essay. These were 'privileged
times', Kimber echoes, 'I treasure these memories'.
Yet what makes this writing most interesting is how so many
questions remain unclear. Here, for once, is a form of
Aboriginal art discussed at length by a host of accomplished
writers. But key ingredients of the Papunya story are either
obscure or the subject of increasingly diverse, often
contradictory explanations. The first few years of Papunya
painting - particularly the period in 1971-72 which local
Aborigines sometimes call 'Bardon-time' - is still not the
subject of anything like a coherent, convincing account.
The confusion over why the artists initially revealed so
much secret material by depicting sacred objects such as
tjurunga,then how and why they made their paintings
more secular, is most significant. The conventional view has
ben that Aboriginal religious practices, including the
treatment of restricted material, were traditionally more or
less static. In the Aboriginal CompanionFranchesca
Cubillo, the Curator of Anthropology at the South Australian
Museum, argues instead that what has been sacred or
restricted has never been the subject of fixed, unchanging
rules. Yet the reasons why Aborigines have revealed this
material to non-Aborigines is still a major issue.
Cubillo is just one of many recent writers who argue that
this disclosure has been and remains a matter of choice on
the part of Aborigines. 'The Community itself', she
maintains, 'dictates and orchestrates the fluid nature of
restricted material'. Yet this argument ignores the power of
non-Aborigines to encourage, if not induce, disclosure.
Rather than being just a matter of Aborigines deciding to
demonstrate the depth and strength of their culture, it has
also been due to an array of outsiders - often
anthropologists and collectors - saying 'We want your
secrets'.
When Bardon first discussed this issue in 1979, he explained
that he 'did not want to know any of the secrets' behind
Papunya painting. Billy Stockman Tjapaltjarri was, he
recounted, one Papunya artist who 'readily understood' his
concern that 'secret-sacred topics should not be painted for
sale'. Judith Ryan of the National Gallery of Victoria has
suggested that Bardon actively 'attempted to steer the
artists away from secret-sacred elements'. Dick Kimber has
dubbed Bardon 'innocent'. But Christopher Anderson and
Francoise Dussart have linked Bardon to the disclosure of
this material, suggesting that the Papunya artists possibly
depicted it due to Bardon asking them "to do 'special'
paintings for him".
A more common explanation is that the first Papunya
paintings were not produced for public sale. The sociologist
Vivien Johnson has suggested that the artists painted them
'primarily for themselves'. Kimber has suggested that they
were produced more for Bardon who not only was treated by
the Aborigines as 'a first-stage initiate', which entitled
him to see what other whitefellas could not, but also was
forming his own collection of paintings.
Either way, as more than one writer has put it, 'as soon as
the works began to be sold the art began to change'. Rather
than reveal their secrets to the marketplace, the artists
developed ways of avoiding or hiding the sacred. The dots,
which became markedly more prominent in Papunya painting
from 1973, are typically thought to have been crucial.
Kimber identified them in 1981 as a prime means of
'eliminating some elements used on some sacred objects'.
Ryan characterized them in 1989 as 'masking', even
'camouflage'.
Yet Bardon was quick to try to sell the first Papunya
paintings. Acting as the artists' 'agent', although without
ever receiving a commission, he took some to Iris Harvey's
Arunta Art Gallery and Bookshop in Alice Springs. His main
outlet was another Alice Springs gallery, Pat Hogan's Stuart
Art Centre. Bardon took 29 paintings there in about July
1971. A year later, he had brought in 18 more consignments -
a total of 620 pictures.
These paintings also won prizes and sold fast. In August
1971 Kaapa Tjampitjinpa was one of the joint winners of the
inaugural Caltex Art Award in Alice Springs. In October 1971
the new Museum and Art Gallery of the Northern Territory
bought a remarkable 78 of the 130 paintings in the first 3
consignments taken by Bardon to the Stuart Art Centre - a
degree of immediate public recognition enjoyed by no other
new Australian art movement, Aboriginal or
non-Aboriginal.
This early success - often overlooked as part of crude
generalizations that the artists' work was ignored and
neglected throughout the 1970s - confounds the claim that
Papunya painting was not initially in the public domain. It
also makes sense of the Papunya men's appetite for painting
with European materials. As Bardon records in the AGNSW
catalogue, the Aborigines were 'amazed' by this new source
of income and promptly began painting with unprecedented
enthusiasm. Without these sales, the movement could well
have fizzled as the Aborigines came to dismiss Bardon's
claim that 'painting was a way of making money'.
A stronger explanation - most clearly developed by Kimber in
a 1995 essay 'The Politics of the Secret' - turns on whether
the paintings were seen by other 'tradition-oriented
Aborigines', not whether they were for sale. Kimber suggests
that no other senior Aborigines saw Kaapa Tjampitjinpa's
prize-wining picture at the Alice Springs show or the
paintings at the Stuart Art Centre, which were never visible
from the street. Instead, they first saw one of the new
paintings at an Aboriginal arts and crafts display at
Yuendumu in August 1972. Then, in late 1973, a senior
Walpiri man saw a large group of Papunya paintings stored in
Alice Springs.
The response, on these and later occasions, was intense. In
1972 there was an 'angry uproar' from senior Pitjantjatjara
men who considered the painting a 'serious transgression'.
In 1973 the Walpiri man was so shocked both by the number of
pictures and by their content that he 'spoke in whispers,
telling of a man he believed to have been murdered because
of the secret-sacred aspects depicted in one painting'. When
an exhibition of Papunya painting was held at the Residency
Museum and Art Gallery in Alice Springs in 1974, a bout of
stone throwing led to several of the paintings being removed
from public display.
Whether dots were the artists' means of hiding this sacred
content is another matter. Johnson first queried this
argument in 1991 in the exhibition catalogue, The Painted
Dream,on the basis of one of John Tjakamarra's first
paintings. She argued that the very detailed dotted
background of this Ground Picturefrom 1971 'brought
into doubt the view that this element entered the style
several years into the movement, when secularisation ...
became part of the artists' concerns'.
Kimber added to these doubts in 1995 when he attributed the
artists' embrace of dotting at least partly to the arrival
at Papunya of Peter Fannin, a new arts adviser who was
otherwise a botanist with a keen interest in the vegetation
of central Australia. As explained by Kimber, the Papunya
artists responded to Fannin's particular interests (as they
had earlier to those of Bardon) by depicting more plants and
bush foods in their work. Dots were a conventional means of
doing so in the Aborigines' ground paintings, hence 'not
surprisingly' they became 'more prominent in much of the new
acrylic art'.
The anthropologist Fred Myers further undermined the
'camouflage' argument in the most interesting essay in
Howard Morphy's and Margo Smith Boles's Art from the
Land(1999). Myers, who began studying Papunya painting
already in 1973 while working in the central desert, accepts
that 'the politics of secrecy' may have been 'a factor' in
dotting becoming one of its hallmarks. But he implies it was
probably not of great consequence as it 'was not a dominant
theme of discussions' he had with Pintupi artists between
1973 and 1975.
When Hetti Perkins and Hannah Fink recently reflected on
this Papunya literature in Art and Australia,they
suggested that these discrepancies were partly due to most
of the writers being 'protagonists' who took 'refuge in the
partiality of personal reminiscence'. They also emphasized
the complexity of writing anything like a definitive account
of Papunya painting. 'It is a story that cannot be told in
any one way', they observed, 'Anthropological, political,
historical, art critical: it is all of these things at once,
and none of them entirely'.
Yet these problems are far from unique to Papunya. Most
writers about particular regional forms of Aboriginal art
are or have been entwined in the development of these
movements whether through long stints of fieldwork (in the
manner of Howard Morphy and Luke Taylor) or through years as
art advisers (in the manner of Djon Mundine). Most, if not
all, other Aboriginal art forms would similarly benefit from
writing which draws on anthropology and politics, history
and art criticism.
One possibility, still, is for the original artists to have
more of a public voice. As Dick Kimber recognized in 1995 in
'The Politics of the Secret', his account could 'undoubtedly
be refined by the surviving artists if they so desire'.
Since then, many have died, but eight of the original 30 are
still alive. While they might not want to discuss the
secret, they might illuminate many other, less sensitive
aspects of Papunya painting's first years.
Yet the inconsistencies and gaps in the Papunya story are a
spur for more writing not just about Papunya but also the
many Aboriginal art forms which have been subject to
interpretative monopolies. If these movements sustained more
writers, there sometimes would be radical revision of
existing accounts. In other cases, the new writing would
simply confirm and embellish the old. Yet even this
corroboration would be valuable. Even the best writers need
competition, if only to show how good they are.
Tim Bonyhady's latest book isThe Colonial Earth,
just published by Melbourne University Press. This article first appeared as 'Sacred Sights' in
theSydney Morning Herald, 9 December 2000, Spectrum pp. 4-5.
References
Relevant links:
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
http://www.australianhumanitiesreview.org/copyright.html for copyright notice.