INCHOATE THOUGHTS
“ICONS OF THE
DESERT: EARLY ABORIGINAL PAINTINGS FROM PAPUNYA”
Fowler Museum of Cultural History, University of California, Los
Angeles, CA
May 3 — August 2, 2009
(Previously at the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell
University, Ithaca, NY. Also to be exhibited at the Grey Art Gallery, New York
University, New York, NY September 1 — December 5, 2009.)
The recent formation of private collections of Australian
paintings raises the vexed matter of the cultural appropriation of indigenous
art. Is the commodification of Native products within a value and exchange system
initially unfamiliar to Native artists simply exploitation? When his 1972
painting Water Dreaming at Kalipinypa
(Cat. 27) was sold at auction in 2000, Johnny Warangkula Tjupurrula (c.
1918-2001) was quoted as saying that “he would not mind a slice of the $486,000
having received only $150 for the work when he sold it … to ‘get tucker’” [buy
food]. The purchasers in 2000 were John and Barbara Wilkerson, from whose
collection this exhibition is exclusively drawn. Where did that extra
“sumptuary value” (to use Jean Baudrillard’s term, referred to by Roger
Benjamin in the excellent exhibition catalogue) come from?
Yet no one could have anticipated the consequences of
encouraging the male elders at the central Australian settlement of Papunya,
west of Mparntwe (Alice Springs) to adapt their highly sophisticated pictorial
representation of traditional knowledge. Until 1971, these elders had practiced
their pictorial skills in temporary ceremonial sand paintings, and on sacred tjurunga boards. Then they began to use
acrylic paints on masonite. This move has accrued its own mythology, recounted
in the exhibition. A white Australian—the teacher Geoffrey Bardon—was the
facilitator. The founding moment was the painting of the mural Honey Ant Dreaming on an exterior wall
of the local school by elders including Billy Stockman Tjapaltjarri, Long Jack
Phillipus Tjakamarra, and Old Mick Tjakamarra. This was a highly visible local
breakthrough, for even though painting on a wall entailed adaptation to a white
fella medium, those running a white fella institution—the local school—were
clearly valuing an indigenous form for the first time.
The founding myth recounts how Bardon then made modern painting
materials available to the older men who had the considerable traditional
knowledge proper to initiates and cultural guardians. They worked in the Men’s
Painting Room, a secluded space where they could articulate that knowledge
without fear of their paintings being seen by those susceptible to the harm they
can cause. These are powerful objects. The most potent among them are exhibited
in the United States only with the permission of responsible elders, and
reproduced in a removable supplement to the catalogue available only in the
United States.
The men worked seated on the ground, painting on small, often
irregular panels of masonite, composition board, or scrap wood balanced on
their laps. Their earliest works are the least guarded in their expression of
sacred knowledge, often concerning the highly charged desert topography
invested with numinous significance by a people who have lived in and guarded
it for countless generations. Following the early sales of their works, the
painters soon realized that they should be more circumspect in their representation
of potent imagery. Defining the proper boundaries of their own practice,
members of the Papunya Tula artists’ collective no longer included subtly
expressive human figures, such as Clifford Possum Tjapaltjarri (c. 1932-2002)
had depicted in his first painting on composition board, Emu Corroboree Man in February, 1972 (Cat. 18, reproduced only in
the removable supplement). Even if silhouetted human figures were an adaptation
of European conventions, their use in representations of ceremonies (corroborees) by indigenous artists was
long established, as can be seen in the work of Tommy McCrae (1835-1901). The
Papunya artists drew veils over sensitive details, often using stippling, as
they made the transition to working on an increasingly large scale on canvas.
Once white administrators recognized the value of such works as
emblems of Australianness, government funds became available. Paintings were
snapped up for the decoration of embassies. They ceased to be “tourist art,”
and entered the international art market. A number of the Papunya artists’
later works are included in the exhibition for comparison with their early
pieces. But, contrary to received opinion, this is not a story of naïve
indigenous people doing the bidding of white fellas, compromising their
traditional artistry by adopting white media to enter the globalized art world.
From the very beginning, and at every turn,
Shorty Lungkarta Tjungurrayi (1920-1987), Mick Namararri Tjapaltjarri
(c. 1927-1998), Charlie Tarawa (Tjararu) Tjungurrayi (c. 1921-1999), and their
fellows, exercised their own judgment, made their own choices, and took the
initiative in selectively adapting their pictorial traditions to new
circumstances. On their own terms, they led the way in reconciling the
conditions of modernity with one of the oldest cultural traditions on the
planet. The achievement is stunning.