No Man's Tongue

Susan Wirth: Diorama

2011-08-27T10:09:00.000-07:00

It has been such a long time since I have updated this blog, mostly due to the rather hectic nature of this year, which has seen me get married and move country. Nonetheless, the time has come to add some new (old) things, starting with this piece that I wrote to accompany the solo exhibition Diorama by the Melbourne-based artist Susan Wirth. The exhibition was held at Gallerysmith in North Melbourne from 3-26 March 2011.

For nearly 100 years, Victorian school kids had pushed their noses against the glass and stared transfixed. There, just beyond the portal stood another world, a distant place, unfamiliar, but almost within reach. Behind the glass, a group of Yarra Yarra Aborigines stood frozen in time. Outside, Melbourne had boomed into a bustling metropolis, but here, in the silent confines of the museum, traditional Aboriginal lifestyle had stayed the same, undisturbed by the arrival of European colonists. When the display was first acquired, it had been the pride of the National Museum of Victoria. Commissioned by the Victorian government for the 1886 Colonial Exhibition in London, it was the very first diorama owned by the young institution.

In the 19th century, dioramas represented the height of a museum’s aspirations. For the National Museum of Victoria, the Yarra Yarra Aborigines diorama symbolised a particular moment of triumph; after three decades of financial and political struggle, the Museum had finally established itself as an integral part of Victorian society. Increased government funding meant that the institution could finally realise some of its grander aspirations, and the family of Yarra Yarra Aborigines was soon joined by a series of elaborate and expensive dioramas – lions on the savannah, polar bears in the arctic, kangaroos on the plains – all displayed in artfully illusory settings designed to transport the viewer to distant lands.

As a symbol of the 19th century museum, the diorama was, to paraphrase Winston Churchill, natural history as written by its victors. The diorama offered a frontier through which the entire world could, very literally, be laid out for European consumption. In the case of displays like the Yarra Yarra Aborigines, this presented a particularly insidious metaphor. Under the sway of orthogenetic theories of evolution, Aboriginal culture was seen as an earlier stage in the teleological progress of human civilization. Aboriginal culture was seen like an archaeological remnant of primeval man. Once contact was made with the more ‘advanced’ cultures, it was inevitable that this ‘primitive’ culture would disappear. Not only did this lead to an urgency on behalf of early anthropologists to record and collect ethnographic data for the information it could shed on the development of humanity, but it also made displays like the Yarra Yarra Aborigines diorama a melancholy snapshot of the end of the line for stone-age man.

If, a century later, things had not changed much for the family of Yarra Yarra Aborigines, by the 1980s, the modern world had begun to creep into the halls of the museum. Static displays gave way to interactive learning terminals, symptomatic of a new postmodern inclusiveness that posited history as open to multiple subject positions. History was repositioned as a mythopoetic process in which we were all participants; it was, as Greg Dening has argued, “metonymic of the present, metaphoric of the past; it presents – makes a now of the past, delivers the past in some dramatic display.”

The role of the new museum was not so much to show history, but to unveil the mechanisms of its performance – like a magician revealing his own tricks. The static diorama had no place in this new regime, unless used as an object for a knowing self-critique. And so, in 1980, the Yarra Yarra Aborigine diorama was dismantled, along with each of the other scenes. Once the pride of the museum’s displays, they were now relegated to storage, the quaint relics of a bygone era: ‘museum pieces’ of past museological practice.

It is, therefore, a curious decision by Melbourne-based contemporary artist Susan Wirth to title her latest series of works Diorama. The works are certainly not dioramas in any traditional sense. Rather, they consist of a delicate assemblage of lace, fabric and embroidery tacked flat onto board. From this artful arrangement shimmer the images of explorers in the landscape, recreating the etchings of the 19th century naturalist and ethnographer Wilhem von Blandowski (1822-1878).

Despite having the distinction of being the first employee of the National Museum of Victoria, Blandowski can hardly be considered a victor in the spoils of history. Due in small part to fate, and perhaps in large part to his obstreperous temperament, Blandowski’s achievements as one of Australia’s pioneering natural historians have, until recently, gone largely unnoticed. After committing an egregious error of taxonomic etiquette – naming two unsightly fish after distinguished gentlemen who felt slighted by the comparison – in 1859 Blandowski left Australia in disgrace, his grand scientific visions unrealised. After failing to find support for his natural history projects in Europe, Blandowksi abandoned science altogether, finishing his life as a portrait photographer in the Polish city of Gleiwitz.

While the mythology of Australian nationalism has often heralded the lone figure – the solitary explorer, lone bushman or heroic stockman – as a historical figure, Blandowski exists so far on the fringe, so ‘outside’ the establishment, that he was almost entirely forgotten by Australian history. His memory was erased almost without trace, discovered only in the scant echo of a few prints found in European museums. It is these images that are revived in Wirth’s latest series of works.

In some ways, Wirth is also an artistic outsider – not cantankerous like Blandowski, but certainly cut from a different mould to the average hip young Melbourne contemporary artist. Wirth came to art after an extended period of travel in Europe. Like many young Australians, she felt the need to leave Australia, to see the world and escape the wasteland of cultural cringe. And yet, like so many exiles, Wirth began with the perspective of distance to yearn for the place she had left behind. Rather than returning to one of the urban centres, Wirth relocated to Darwin. Even today, when expensive apartments crowd the coast and the skyline is abuzz with the storking cranes of development, Darwin remains very much a frontier settlement, a border-zone between European civilization and the vast heartland of the Australian wilderness. The town is a magnet for drifters and chancers; a place where two cultures are thrown together; where all human endeavours seem based upon improvisation; a bricolage town where impermanence is a permanent state of being. In this sense, we might say there is something uniquely ‘Darwinian’ in Wirth’s most recent body of work, where fragments of the past – lace, embroidery, fabric and quilts – are refashioned into something new, their patterns and rhythms reordered into a new image.

It is important here to make a distinction between Wirth’s ‘recycling’ of old materials and the ironic, postmodernist act of appropriation. Wirth’s use of fabric and lace – whether handed down from her mother and grandmother, or purchased in thrift shops – is less about the appropriation of pre-existing meanings than a wholesale systematic re-imagining. For Wirth, the usefulness of an object such as a piece of fine lacework is not in what it reveals about the past, but how it can be reused in the present. In the artist’s hand, the fragment can be cut, torn, dyed, twisted, reassembled and remade into something entirely different. Thus, Wirth’s grandmother’s quilt – an object seemingly rich in nostalgic possibilities – is transformed into the writhing umbilical chaos of Spillage 2011. It is an evocative transformation in which the quilt becomes its own biomorphic entity, part of a slithering alien landscape that belies little trace of its past.

It is tempting to extend a similar logic to Wirth’s two-dimensional works, such as her Diorama series or her images drawn from old family photographs, such as Stella 2010. This is precisely the reasoning used by Kate Just in her nuanced critique of Wirth’s 2005 exhibition She’s crafty... and she’s just my style held at West Space in Melbourne. Commenting on Wirth’s recreation of family photographs – in many instances containing relatives about whom Wirth knew little or nothing – Just argues that Wirth’s “subject is the disconnection from (or lack of) a defined personal culture. … [T]ime intensive processes like knitting, stitching or carving … allow the artist time to question, retrieve and rebuild a real or imagined history.”

And yet, it seems to me that there is a much more complex relationship between image and medium at play in Wirth’s work. One of the first things that most people notice when viewing these works is their virtuosity – how skilfully the artist is able to recreate a photographic image from an assemblage of found objects. From an abstract farrago of patterns, a clear, precise image shimmers into being. This creates a crisis of precession: what comes first, the image or the object? In some ways, the image feels almost like an afterthought, in other ways, like an act of elaborate trickery. The end effect is the sense that the image is always present, waiting to be teased out – or, put another way, that no object is without echoes of an image, the traces of which remain even if we do not know precisely how to read them.

What, then, is the meaning of Wirth’s appropriation of Blandowski? Even if Blandowski had not left Australia in disgrace, it is doubtful that his works would have ever entered into the nationalist canon, so far divorced are they from the dominant themes of the Australian mythos. Unlike the tragic figures of Burke and Wills, Blandowski’s vision of the Australian wilderness was not one of death and desolation, but rather, one of phenomenological grandeur and beauty. Take for instance his rapturous description of the scene that forms Wirth’s Diorama 2 (2010): “a massive wall of dolerite whose deep blue and sombre hues is in exquisite harmony with the dark green of the eucalypts.” Blandowski was equally quick to find merit in the knowledge of Australia’s Indigenous inhabitants, chiding the government for its maltreatment and failure to protect the country’s first inhabitants.

At the same time, Blandowski was not averse to performance and illusion in constructing the narrative of his images. In his etchings, he would often insert himself as a lone figure, dwarfed by the landscape, suggesting a moment of first sight. Wirth’s choice to appropriate these etchings, displayed like faded snapshots across board, draws attention to the very constructed nature of the imagery they contain. If Blandowkski was attempting to construct a vision of first sight, Wirth’s appropriation suggests that this first sight is always mediated, its representation simply the repetition of an imaginary moment. Like the museum diorama then, Wirth’s Dioramas are about illusion: the illusion of life, the illusion of presence, the illusion of history.

It is worth noting the strange visual affinity between Wirth’s Dioramas and the paintings of Fred Williams. Williams holds a unique position in Australian art history as the artist who most successfully married the lessons of Modernism with the Australian landscape. In other words, Williams took the specific (that is, the Australian landscape) and united it with the generic (international modernism, with its Greenbergian teleological progression towards the specificity of the medium). Following this logic, in his simple flecks of paint on the flat ground of the canvas – such as in his Yellow Landscape, 1968-1969, in the collection of Geelong Art Gallery – Williams was able to create a landscape that was simultaneously here and everywhere; a particular place and nowhere at all. If we continue this reasoning into Wirth’s work, then the tension between medium and image becomes about making something very specific (nostalgia, memory, family) into something generic (the illusory performance of the diorama).

But if the narratives of place, history, family, and so on, are nothing but a literal veil, then what is left? In the case of Williams’ paintings, it is the flat canvas – the very endpoint of Greenbergian modernism. In Wirth’s work, it something quite different: the flat sanded grain of commercial timber. The polished boards, with their faint memory of nature in the still-present rings of the tree trunk, become like the museum diorama, where nature is brought under human control, just as it is in the supposedly scientific natural history etchings of Blandowksi. The landscape – from the trees to the birds – becomes nothing but a pastiche, ready to be re-stitched and reordered, to be put to work of construction of history and mythology. This is Wirth’s dangerous idea. For if all history is simply a performance – a dioramic stage that can be either playful or serious – what is to become of the hierarchies upon which our established mythologies have been based? To return to Dening, it creates a history that does not believe in its own fictions: a history that does not attempt to replicate reality, but to redress reality. It would be very wrong to read this as melancholy in Wirth’s work, or to suggest her collages attest to the emptiness of signs. For there is a heroic pleasure in Wirth’s performance – a mythic figuring in which the diminutive figure of Stella Wirth might stand in for Heracles or Perseus. Wrought large on the stage of the canvas, in a sparkling brocade of jewels and lace, Stella is the hero of a new history written not by the victors, but by the performers: those ready, like Wirth, to take centre stage.

Bardayal 'Lofty' Nadjamerrek AO

2010-12-15T03:52:00.000-08:00

Last week, I had the great pleasure of attending the opening of Bardayal 'Lofty' Nadjamerrek's retrospective at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney. It is a truly extraordinary exhibition that confirmed my opinion that he was one of the greatest Australian artists of the last 50 years. Below is a piece that I wrote on Bardayal for the Nov/Dec edition of Art Guide Australia.

It is a strange feeling to be waiting for a giant. That is how I found myself, on a particularly hot afternoon in February 2006, as I watched passengers disembark from an aeroplane into the terminal at Tullamarine Airport. I had never met Bardayal Nadjamerrek, but I knew his artworks intimately. From the moment I first saw them, I was transfixed by their gravity and seriousness. Though I could not yet interpret what they were saying, I could recognise the terse eloquence and profound conviction with which they spoke. It was the paintings of Bardayal Nadjamerrek that awakened me to the beauty and relevance of Indigenous culture, and helped shape my appreciation and understanding of Aboriginal art. Such a personal tribute might seem small recognition for an artist of his standing, but it is a fitting salute to an artist and leader who spent much of his life striving to make people realise the value of Indigenous knowledge. Over the past four decades, he was a towering figure in Indigenous art and culture, more than living up to the epithet ‘Lofty’ that was foisted upon him as a young man working on the tin mines at Maranboy. Platitudes are hardly necessary; his legacy is assured.

As the stream of passengers slowed to a trickle, at last an old man was wheeled from the aeroplane. Sensing us approach, he pushed himself up from the chair, unfolding to his towering height. Waving his long spindly arms upwards, he gestured towards us, and in a rich husky voice, declared, “I’m Bardayal Nadjamerrek.”

Bardayal was born around 1926 at Kukkulumurr in the upper reaches of the Mann River region of Western Arnhem Land. His father, Yanjorluk, was from the Honey Dreaming Ankung Djang estate of the Mok Clan. His youth was spent traversing the Arnhem Land plateau with his family, developing a detailed knowledge of the stone country. During this time, he began his long artistic apprenticeship, watching his father and other men paint on the rocky outcrops and shelters. With the onset of World War II, Bardayal was indentured to service cutting timber for the war effort. Later in life, he worked as a miner, stockman, buffalo shooter and market gardener. Despite this, his connection to traditional culture remained strong, and he remained active in the ceremonial activities of the region.

In his later years, Bardayal would come to be respected as one of the most senior and important leaders in Western Arnhem Land. From the 1970s, he was instrumental in assisting Indigenous families to return to their traditional lands, helping to establish six different outstations. It was only in the mid-1990s that he was able to achieve his goal of returning to his own clan estate, by which stage government funding for outstations had ceased. Not to be deterred, Bardayal funded the creation of an outstation at Kubulwarnamyo himself. This tiny, makeshift community became like a bush university – a magnet for anthropologists, ecologists, linguists, botanists and art historians, all congregated around this grand sage of the Arnhem Land plateau. Bardayal was a true renaissance man, an encyclopaedia of knowledge on every subject of the stone country. Countless research projects and community programs poured from his tiny outstation, promoting Indigenous land management, heritage and culture.

In some ways, the magnitude of Bardayal’s cultural, social and environmental accomplishments has obscured his artistic achievements. In part due to the market fetish for ‘abstract’ Indigenous art, Bardayal’s work has often been consigned to the unfashionable margins of ‘ethnographic’ art. Even his strongest supporters have tended to focus on his close connection to the rock art heritage of Western Arnhem Land. But Bardayal Nadjamerrek was also a pioneering contemporary artist of the highest order.

Bardayal began painting professionally in 1969 at the Church Mission Society’s Oenpelli mission, under the encouragement of linguist Peter Carroll. Although aged in his mid-forties, he was already an accomplished painter, having many years experience in the rock-art galleries of the stone country. In this sense, Bardayal belonged to an ancient tradition, but it was far from a static tradition. On the rock faces, Bardayal was exposed to a palimpsest of styles, from recent images painted by his father and relatives through to much more ancient images attributed by the Kunwinjku people to ancestral ’mimih’ spirits. Bardayal’s paintings were not simply facsimiles of older works originally painted in rock shelters; his was a singular and extraordinary talent. Immediately recognisable, his work stands out from that of his peers in both its individuality and quality.

Bardayal Nadjamerrek was thus a renaissance man of Western Arnhem Land, at a time when the region as a whole was experiencing huge cultural transformation. In thinking about the idea of renaissance, it is worth comparing Bardayal’s achievements to an artist who might be thought of as his Italian counterpart: Giotto di Bondone. Like Bardayal Nadjamerrek, Giotto’s work was steeped in tradition – in his case, the extraordinary aesthetic accomplishments of the Byzantine Empire. Yet, through their individuality, both artists helped spark an artistic revolution. Like Giotto, Bardayal Nadjamerrek should be seen as a pioneering artist who paved the way for the radical developments that would follow him. Kenneth Clarke once said of Giotto, “Once we have learnt Giotto’s language, we can recognise him as one of the greatest masters of painted drama that has ever lived.” The same could be said for Bardayal Nadjamerrek.

Although his experience as a painter of rock art made him a proficient draughtsman, there are profound difference between rock art and art painted on bark, paper or canvas. Bardayal’s career shows him tackling this with increased sophistication. By the late 1980s, he had settled into a mature style both unmistakably unique and perfectly attuned to the dramatic possibilities of the canvas. He refined the visual language learnt from the rock art heritage, but over his career, Bardayal Nadjamerrek can be seen to experiment with iconographic elements for maximum artistic and allegorical effect. Take, for instance, one of his best-known images, Ngalyod – The Rainbow Serpent, a large mural of which hangs in the arrivals hall of the Darwin International Airport. Bardayal depicts Ngalyod as a combination of animals – the body of a snake, the head of a crocodile and the tail of a fish, with water lilies growing from its back. The importance of this amalgam is threefold. On the one hand, it pays reference to Ngalyod’s status as the ‘mother of all species’, but in another sense, it is about balancing the iconic with the transformative. In the Dreamtime, Ngalyod was said to assume a range of different forms, morphing from one into another.

The severity and gravity of Bardayal’s works mean that they are not as dynamic as some of his contemporaries or followers. In this sense, he is also like Giotto – in both artists, the weight of the figures gives them a heavy sense of static solemnity, so that Bardayal’s paintings can be seen almost like the icons of the Byzantine era. However, by picturing his images, such as Ngalyod, with a transformative potential (having all options included in the image at once), Bardayal’s works become less like frozen snapshots, and become something much more ethereal, as in his depictions of Yawk Yawk – the female water spirit. Just as in the Western myth of Mermaids, Yawk Yawk are believed to have legs while on land, and a fish’s tail when in the water. In Bardayal’s painting, however, the Yawk Yawk is shown having legs within her tail – or rather, having both legs and tail simultaneously. In doing so, Bardayal suggests the presence of multiple possibilities, while creating the dynamic tension of evoking the fleeting moment of transformation.

This visual inventiveness characterises Bardayal’s best works. He was a master of narrative painting, and his images have a searing, haunting intensity. Bardayal’s works gain potency from his sophisticated sense of form and ability to devise complex visual allegories. In the generation that followed Bardayal’s, many Kunwinku artists found a new allure by the introduction of shimmering cross-hatching. It was a path Bardayal refused to go down, claiming it was culturally inappropriate for him. He preferred to stick to the old-style single-line rarrk, like the old people did on the rock shelters. This distinguished him as one of a small group of elderly artists, that included his dear friend Dick Nguleingulei Murrumurru, Peter Nabarlambarl, Bob Namundja, and Kalarriya ‘Jimmy’ Namarnyilk. Of this pioneering school of artists, only the last-named survives.

The last time I saw Bardayal Nadjamerrek was in October 2008. He had retired from painting, but his final works were hanging in the exhibition Continuity: Culture, Country and Family at Mossenson Galleries in Melbourne, alongside those of his son Freddie Nadjamerrek, son-in-law Gabriel Maralngurra, and grandchildren Gavin Namarnyilk, Maath Maralngurra, Allan Nadjamerrek, Ray Nadjamerrek and Simone Nadjamerrek. The old man had not been expected to travel to Melbourne for the exhibition, but, against the instructions of his daughters, he had flown the coop to be with his grandsons at their exhibition. It was a powerful gesture, palpable at the opening, drawing tears from the normally stoic gallery director Diane Mossenson. On the night, Bardayal spoke of his own mortality:

I’m an old man now. Me no good. I might die soon. I don’t know yet. But I’ve lived good at Kabulwarnamyo – with lots of good balanda [whitefellas] and Bininj [Aboriginal people]. But no one was doing proper Bininj paintings … and that’s what they’re doing now – painting all my bim [paintings], all my stories, my grandchildren painting my way now.

In November 2009, I travelled to Gunbalanya for the state funeral of Bardayal Nadjamerrek. It was late in the build-up, and the air hung heavily, as though in sympathy to the sense of irreplaceable loss that hovered in the crowded Uniting church. After the funeral, over tea and biscuits at Injalak Arts and Craft, the art centre’s director Anthony Murphy pulled out a body of paintings by Bardayal’s grandchildren, destined for a forthcoming exhibition in Melbourne. In the year since his visit, the young men had grown in confidence and assurance. They had kept the single line of their grandfather, but slowly their individual identities were becoming apparent beneath his lofty shadow. In that moment, I was transported back to Melbourne in 2007. Sitting before one of his paintings – a beautiful, delicate figure on a red ground – Bardayal had sung the song of Karrarrkbarl – The Moonman. It was not one of Bardayal’s stories, but one that had been entrusted to him by a dying friend. At the end of each month, as the moon wains, Karrarrkbarl sings a mournful song because the moon is dying. At the beginning of the new cycle, as the moon reappears, he begins to sing a happy song to bring the moon back to life. But if Karrarrkbarl does not sing, the moon will not return. In the tentative paintings of Bardayal’s grandchildren, I heard the murmur of a familiar old tune. On bark, paper and canvas, Bardayal Nadjamerrek left an indelible song whose echoes will continue to brighten the cultural landscape for many years to come.

Bardayal 'Lofty' Nadjamerrek is on at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, from 10 December - 20 March 2011.

Col Jordan: A Play on White

2010-10-09T20:55:00.000-07:00

I was only a small boy when I first visited St Mark’s Basilica in Venice. It was late in the afternoon when we arrived, and the fading winter light did little to break through the cold Byzantine depths of the cavernous basilica. Near the altar, a lone curate was busily engaged in preparing the evening service. Noticing us enter the transept, he gestured enthusiastically towards the heavens, before scurrying out of sight. All of a sudden, the building was lit up – the darkness expelled by the glittering brilliance of the basilica’s golden ceilings. Above our heads, Adam and Eve circled in an endless repetition of humanity’s Fall, while higher still, a bearded Heavenly Father separated the heavens from the earth, the land from the sea, and the darkness from the light. It was like a divine evocation of the curate’s act in switching on the electric lights. With our mouths agape, we became one with the million shimmering tesserae, subsumed into the vision unfolding above us – like each tile, we gave up our individuality to partake of the majestic unity of the divine order.

Col Jordan refers to his latest series of paintings as ‘The Mosaic Paintings’, but they are not mosaics in any traditional sense. Over the past four decades, Jordan has established himself as one of Australia’s foremost practitioners of hard-edge, optical abstraction, finding in it an unceasingly fertile ground for artistic experimentation and conceptual exploration. In his latest works, an overlapping selection of geometric shapes jostle for position across the white ground of the canvas, fragmented and unified by the interplay of different patterns. Jordan is a master of visual impact; high-keyed colours are offset against a ground of crisp white, giving the works an impressive bombast similar to the ceilings of St Mark’s.

However, Jordan is not a religious man, and his Mosaic Paintings must be seen in a very different conceptual light to those of his religious precursors. In the mosaics of St Mark’s, the individuality of each tessera is willingly conceded to the whole – a metaphor for the believer’s role in the divine hierarchy – but Jordan’s works have none of this spiritual certainty. In fact, throughout his entire career, Jordan has relentlessly explored the boundaries of paradox, ambiguity and uncertainty. In the dynamic tensions of the picture plane, Jordan draws attention to the entirely subjective nature of vision. His paintings are, in his own words, “celebrations of the infinite variability and unpredictability of the human condition”. This exploration of paradox has reached a new zenith in Jordan’s Mosaic Paintings.

In order to understand the height of this achievement, however, it is worth returning to a work he completed in 1968, Daedalus Series 6, which was exhibited in the landmark exhibition The Field and is now held in the National Gallery of Australia. In 1971, Bernard Smith praised the visual tension of the work, noting that “the tyranny of the frame as structural determinant is challenged increasingly the greater the distance from the edge, as forms and shapes arise which assert a kind of plastic freedom.” Arriving in the late 1960s, when Australian society was being reconfigured as a multicultural panoply, this conscious evocation of visual subjectivity seemed a perfect metaphor for the new, postmodern subject, which was constructed, as Chantal Mouffe has suggested, “at the point of intersection of a multiplicity of subject positions”. Indeed, in 1969, Jordan confirmed the suggestion, drawing a link between pictorial complexity and this changing sense of society and selfhood:

My paintings are about paradox. Visual embodiments of literal impossibility. A work is good to the extent that it reconciles irreconcilables. Daedalus is about directions, tied down and boxed by the stripes of its own identity.

In these stripe paintings of the 1960s and 70s, Jordan set up a tension between the unifying factor of the frame and the individuality of the coloured lines. In a sense, this is the exact opposite to the unifying of tesserae into a single image that occurs in traditional mosaics. And yet, both conceptually and visually, this strategy has its limitations. For Jordan’s paintings are not simply celebrations of unfettered individualism – rather, at their heart they recognise the need to create a “unified visual statement.” They should be seen as explorations of the delicate balance of individuality and community needed to create a democracy of vision.

In this sense, Jordan’s paintings must be considered as paintings of their time. For if, on first viewing, the Mosaic Paintings appear to present a cacophony of individual voices – each shape jostling for dominance – slowly, under Jordan’s skilful hand, they unite beautifully. The artist presents the cacophony of community: a dynamic harmony forged from many voices, as in musical counterpoint. Unlike the Daedalus series, where individuality was bound by the tyranny of the frame, in the Mosaic paintings the picture plane is burst open, threatening the unity of the image. However, under Jordan’s direction, a profuse joy emerges from this confusion. From the many unfettered voices comes a vision not of tyrannically bound unity, but of participatory community.

Jordan’s Mosaic Paintings are extraordinarily complex works, and they do not attempt to suggest that this sense of unity is easily achieved. In a world in which ethnic tensions and religious extremism threaten the stability of communities around the world, these paintings recognise the grand complexity of our epoch. Jordan’s paintings ask us to visualise the hardest paradox of all: how a seemingly chaotic jumble of individual entities can combine to make a world of poetry and beauty.

Col Jordan: A Play on White is on at Mossenson Galleries in Collingwood from 5-31 October 2010.

Vale Shane Pickett

2010-08-24T05:11:00.000-07:00

This week I have been doing a bit of reading on Robert Dale's Panoramic View of King George's Sound, Part of the Colony of Swan River, which presents a colonial depiction of Nyoongar people around Albany. I've been wondering about how the Nyoongar people of Western Australia view this work. If he was still alive, I would have called Shane Pickett in an instant, and I am sure he would have spent a great deal of time discussing the various aspects of the work - giving generously of his knowledge, and taking pleasure in sharing it. This small instance served to remind me how much we all lost in his sudden passing in January last this year. Below is an extended version of a tribute that I wrote for the February edition of Art Monthly Australia.

Shane Pickett
19 February 1957 – 15 January 2010

I last saw Shane Pickett in the week before his death. Ever an industrious artist, he was busy putting the final touches on a series of delicate figurative landscape paintings intended for a solo exhibition in Melbourne. Spindly gum trees and gently undulating hills glowed with an outback haze against the white walls of his studio. In the past decade, Pickett had garnered widespread acclaim for his commanding abstract paintings, but few outside of Western Australia were aware that this was where his artistic journey first began. Flashing his famously impish smile, he quipped at the surprise that these works would elicit amidst the cosmopolitan Melbourne scene.

Although lauded as an abstractionist, Pickett never ceased to consider himself a landscape painter. In returning to figuration, he hoped to draw attention to the continuity of his concerns; to show the close connection his paintings maintained to his Nyoongar landscape. At the same time, he wanted to show just how much he had developed, to reveal the cultural, spiritual and artistic journey that underpinned his career. He titled the exhibition Djinong Djina Boodja – a Nyoongar phrase meaning ‘look at the land that I have travelled.’

It was a rare moment of retrospection from an artist whose career had been characterised by a restless forward trajectory of transformation and reinvention. After a career spanning three decades, Pickett had much to look back upon with pride. He had held at least 27 solo exhibitions and been involved in nearly 100 group shows. His works had travelled to America, Europe and Asia, and had been acquired by many of Australia’s most important collections, including the National Gallery of Australia, the National Gallery of Victoria and the Art Gallery of Western Australia.

And yet, these were not the things that most interested Pickett. Although a proud man, he was never vainglorious and rarely spoke of his successes or achievements. When questioned, he preferred to speak on the cultural aspects of his art and career, measuring his journey not by accolades, but by his deepening knowledge of his Nyoongar heritage. For Pickett, art and life were united in an ever-expanding process of learning, in which spiritual and artistic developments were combined in a continually evolving process of creation.

A metaphor for this process can be seen in Pickett’s many representations of the moment of creation. This was the theme of his first important abstract work – Supernova 1988 – and it culminated in one of his best known paintings On the Horizon of the Dreaming Boodja 2005 (National Gallery of Australia). In the latter work [pictured above], delicate beams of light break through an abyss of white impasto, signifying “the birth of life, breaking through the warmth of eternity, bringing the beginning of the Dreaming Boodja, a place mankind calls earth.” In visualising this moment, when everything is born from the vacuum of nothingness, Pickett created a profound meditation on the nature of being. The viewer is held in suspense, literally stuck in the space between existence and non-existence, suspended forever on the horizon of being.

Pickett’s life and career presents a similar ontological conundrum. Like a supernova, he was an incredible creative source. Through his inspiration and influence he helped guide three decades of development and change in Indigenous art, culture and identity, particularly amongst the Nyoongar community of Western Australia. On the other hand, Pickett was very much a man of his time, with much of the resonance of his artwork and personal philosophy coming from their perfect articulation of the changing moods and attitudes of the world around him.

The son of Fred and Dorcas May Pickett, Shane Pickett was born in 1957 in the wheat-belt town of Quairading, about 170 kilometres east of Perth. Surrounded by athletic siblings but suffering from rheumatoid arthritis, Pickett gravitated to art from an early age. In 1988 he recalled, “I can’t remember a time when I didn’t have a pencil or brush in my hand.” The Nyoongar people had a strong artistic lineage, springing from the figurative landscape style that emerged from the Carrolup River Native Settlement in the 1940s. It was a style that Pickett quickly mastered, taking the intense colours of the Carrolup school and matching it with a rugged lyricism. After completing high-school, he moved to Perth, where in 1976 he held his first solo exhibition at the New Era Aboriginal Centre.

Much like the school of watercolour painting that evolved around Albert Namatjira and the Luthern Mission at Hermannsburg, the Carrolup style represented a very particular Indigenous response to colonialism. In an era in which assimilation remained official policy, these styles allowed a subtle communication of the significance of the Indigenous landscape, camouflaged within a palatably European medium. The spiritual and cultural underpinnings of these works remained largely unnoticed, and their subversion of Western perspective unrecognized.

By the early 1980s, as issues such as land rights and Indigenous self-determination began to gain momentum Pickett, like many Indigenous people, had begun to seek a more assertive vision of Indigenous identity. Taking the skills learnt as a landscape painter, he moved into the realm of magic realism. Again, a landmark work from the period concerned the moment of creation. Waagle – The Rainbow Serpent 1983 (Art Gallery of Western Australia), was a graphic, fantasy-style representation of the Rainbow Serpent in the act of creating the Nyoongar people. Swathed in atmospheric layers of paint, it was a lurid visualization of an epic story, and showed Pickett assertively extending himself beyond the picturesque boundaries of the Carrolup style.

Pickett’s confidence in his Nyoongar cultural identity was matched with an increasing visibility in the local community. Pickett moved in a circle of supportive and ambitious young Nyoongar men, which included playwright Richard Walley, actor Ernie Dingo and artist Lance Chadd, all of whom cite him as a source of wisdom, counsel and inspiration. In 1981 Pickett produced the sets for Jack Davis’ play Kullark – The Dreamers, and he volunteered his time to many Indigenous groups including the Aboriginal Planning Group, the WA Aboriginal Artists Advisory Council and the Australia Council’s Visual Arts and Craft Committee for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Arts. It was around this stage that Pickett’s career began to flourish. In 1986 he was awarded the Museum and Art Galleries Award at the Third National Aboriginal Art Awards and in 1988 he was declared WA Aboriginal Artist of the Year.

While his landscape and magic realist tableaus brought him great respect and admiration in Western Australia, it was his move to abstraction in the late 1990s that saw Pickett‘s recognition as an artist of truly national standing. This coincided with a long association with gallerist Diane Mossenson of Indigenart, Mossenson Galleries. At Mossenson Galleries, Pickett found the stability and encouragement to experiment, developing a unique personal style of gestural abstraction. His decade-long association with Indigenart was the most productive and successful era of his career, and saw him included in numerous important exhibitions including South West Central (Art Gallery of Western Australia, 2003) and Culture Warriors: The National Indigenous Art Triennial (National Gallery of Australia, 2007). In 2006 he was granted a retrospective at the Perth Institute for Contemporary Arts. In the same year he won the Sunshine Coast Art Award and the Joondalup Invitation Art Award, and in 2007 he was awarded the $40,000 first prize in the inaugural Drawing Together Art Award.

Pickett’s move to abstraction was driven by a desire to find deeper, more intuitive spiritual meanings in the landscape. According to Nick Tapper, “Pickett came to feel that representation of the skin and hair of the environment – its landforms, flora and fauna – missed the resonant undercurrents flowing amongst these elements.” As he matured, and his cultural knowledge increased, Pickett increasingly felt that traditional representations were incapable of expressing his deeper understanding of the landscape.

With this knowledge, he realised, came a greater responsibility. This was something that Pickett felt strongly about – both in respecting his elders and passing his knowledge to a younger generation of Nyoongar people. Shortly before his death, he confided that his proudest achievement was his participation in the monumental Ngallak Koort Boodja (Our Heartland) canvas produced on behalf of the Nyoongar elders for the 2006 Perth International Arts Festival. Pickett took great pride and pleasure in the extensive consultation with both the community and elders of the Nyoongar nations that occurred before commencing work on the monumental piece. He saw the project as being an important galvanising moment in the Nyoongar community, and felt that it was imperative that it correctly reflected the teachings and values of his elders.

Between 1980 and 1983, Pickett completed a Diploma in Fine Arts at the Claremont School of Fine Arts in Western Australia. Although he valued the technical skills he had learnt there, Pickett often lamented the lack of Indigenous teachers. He sought to redress this imbalance, offering his services in numerous community workshops, primary and secondary colleges, along with teaching Aboriginal prisoners at Canningvale Prison. An important role model in his community, he dedicated considerable time to assisting with troubled or disaffected youth, guiding them quietly and calmly with his gently spoken cultural teachings.

Pickett was also influential for young Nyoongar painters. Between 1996 and 2003, he worked as a lecturer at TAFE in Midland and Bunbury, helping to develop the Diploma of Aboriginal Visual Arts course. Pickett’s influence and stewardship led to the widespread adoption of his style amongst a younger generation of artists. The success of his abstractions inaugurated a new school of Nyoongar painting whose influence can be seen in the work of many young artists, including Ben Pushman and Troy Bennell.

At its heart, Pickett’s move to abstraction had a cross-cultural mission. From his earliest works, he saw himself as an ambassador for Nyoongar culture. Although a softly spoken, quiet advocate, Pickett was unwavering in his championing of Nyoongar cultural values. Generous with both his time and knowledge, he was a popular speaker, as healways willing to patiently explained the complex philosophical minutiae of Nyoongar teachings.

Pickett’s abstract paintings communicate these teachings intuitively to an uninitiated audience. According to Pickett, “A lot of them don’t know what they are seeing, but often they’ll have an idea. When they do know what the story is about, they get drawn in.” For Pickett, abstraction was a method for leading people to their own personal communication with the Dreaming, and through this, to a respect and understanding of Indigenous values. Perhaps this explains the popular appeal of Pickett’s work, for like Pickett, they were never judgemental, but softly guided the viewer into a dialogue with the magical world of the Dreaming. In 2007, he noted, “The Dreams do run strongly through the views of my life.” This is perhaps his lasting legacy; in Pickett’s Dreaming we find a dialogue that crosses all cultural barriers, uniting all people within his a powerful cosmology of reconciliation.

Shane Pickett died on Friday 15 January 2010 following a sudden bout of illness. He is survived by his wife Violet, his sons Roger and Trevor, and his five grandchildren.

A Contemporary Spirit: The Art of Graham Badari

2010-05-30T03:09:00.000-07:00

A pair of red eyes glowers from an angular, skeletal visage. Its snarling grimace revels sharp teeth, its razor-like claws borne forth ready to strike. This is one of the unseen dangers of the bush: Namarnde, the malevolent spirit of the box pandanus. When pregnant, Kunwinjku women avoid walking too close to pandanus bushes, in case Namarnde captures the spirit of their unborn babes. In Graham Badari’s painting, this terror is brilliantly evoked through a combination of jagged ferocity and delicate cross-hatching or rarrk. His painting transports the viewer to the mystical landscape of the stone country, where spirits inhabit every crevice and ancient paintings adorn the rock-faces. At the same time, Badari’s Namarnde is uncannily futuristic, bearing a striking resemblance to the cyborg Maria from Fritz Lang’s 1927 sci-fi epic Metropolis.

Graham Badari was born in 1963 at Gunbalanya (Oenpelli) in Western Arnhem Land. His country is Maburrinj, near Kudjekbinj, about 120 kilometers east of Gunbalanya. He was raised by the renowned artist Djawida Nadjongorle, but like many of the artist at Gunbalanya, credits the late Thompson Yulidjirri as his greatest artistic influence. From these senior men, Badari learnt the fluid and dynamic style that defines Kunwinjku painting at Injalak Arts. He began painting sporadically around 1990, but in recent years, his career has gained a new focus and momentum. Following the recent passing of many of the senior artists at Gunbalanya, Badari has become one of the leaders of a small coterie of dedicated artists, which includes Wilfred Nawirridj, Glenn Namundja, Gabriel Maralngurra, and Gershom Garlngarr. They are a ubiquitous presence at Injalak Arts, and are fiercely proud of their art, community and art centre. Their paintings show a faithful dedication to the visual language of their rock-art heritage, while remaining committed to artistic innovation. It is this beguiling balance of tensions – innovation and tradition, ancient and modern, beauty and terror – that energises Badari’s paintings. And yet, to understand how his work could so effortlessly embody these apparent dualities, it is necessary to understand how these competing positions coexist within Badari’s worldview, informing his unique and eccentric personality.

With his impish smile and cheeky sense of humour, Grahama Badari or ‘Grammy’ as he affectionately known, is the gentlest of souls. He is a popular figure at the art centre, a beloved tour guide and font of community news. And yet, as his paintings suggest, Badari has a fascination with the darker side of life. Walking in the bush, he is careful to warn of the dangers of Namarnde or other malicious spirits such as Namarrodoh. Always concerned with the safety of his guests, he cautions of the equal dangers posed by the very present Kinga (salt-water crocodile) and the more otherworldly Ngalyod (Rainbow Serpent). Badari believes wholeheartedly in the presence of these spirit beings; they are an intrinsic part of the cultural heritage that has informed his life.

On the other hand, Badari is sensitively attuned to the modern world. The ease with which he traverses this cosmology of the mystical and the everyday might go some way to explaining his attraction to western science-fiction and fantasy imagery. This passion is not only evident in Badari’s paintings, but in his distinctive choice of fashion, which favours the kind of lurid fantasy t-shirts more commonly seen on teenage heavy metal fans. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Badari is also a keen follower of heavy metal music, with his favourite band being the Swedish group Hammer Fall. Indeed, it is worth comparing Badari’s depictions of Namarnde and Namarrodoh with the red-eyed, hammer-wielding leviathan featured on the group’s album covers, designed by renowned graphic artist Samwise Didier. That said, when questioned on these striking visual parallels, Badari is quick to refute such influences, preferring to highlight the traditional aspects of his work. To Badari, these are ancient stories that he holds in the deepest respect, and he rejects the suggestion that he might be trifling with them by bringing in profane external influences.

And yet, it is this disavowal that reveals the very essence of Badari’s paintings. For in suggesting that his works are a ‘fusion’ of the traditional and the contemporary, it is vital to note that this is not some sort of wry pastiche of ironic allusions and winking ironies. Badari’s work contains none of this post-modern disingenuousness; he is an artist of deep, abiding integrity. The meticulous care that he takes with his work, with its fine attention to detail and delicate rarrk, is a reflection of the reverence with which he holds both stories that he paints and visual tradition they embody. Badari’s paintings are heartfelt depictions of his cultural heritage, and he paints them with all his being, striving to make them as vivid, striking and beautiful as he knows how. If they are a fusion of old and new, it is because Badari’s worldview completely, comfortably and intuitively traverses both Indigenous and western episteme. His paintings are reflections on a living culture – one that encompasses both ancient tribal songs and heavy metal riffs. Like all great artists, Badari captures the spirit of his time, and through his unique artistry, brings tradition forward into a dynamic contemporary vision.

This piece was written to accompany Graham Badari's first solo exhibition, held at Mossenson Galleries Perth, 16 March-25 April 2010. Portrait photograph of Graham by Lydia Lange.

Geographic Cosmology: The Art of Lucy Ward

2010-05-25T02:16:00.000-07:00

Below is an extended text of the article, "Geographic Cosmology: The Art of Lucy Ward" published in Craft Arts International, no.78, 2010, pp.34-39

It is June 2005 and a heavy thunderstorm has just erupted, pouring noisy torrents of rain upon the tin roof of Mossenson Galleries in Perth, Western Australia. Entering the gallery, octogenarian Kimberley artist Lucy Ward wears a beaming smile as she shakes the rain from her snow-white hair. Approaching a large brown canvas covered in a dozen or more images of her ancestral Wandjina spirits, she runs her hand across the painting, as though affectionately stroking a long lost friend. “My Wandjina,” she exclaims. “You’ve brought the rain!”

Like Ward, these Wandjina are a long way from their Kimberley homelands. And yet, this distance does not weaken their spiritual or elemental power. For the Ngarinyin, Worrorra and Wunambal people of the north-west Kimberley, the Wandjina are the central figure of religious significance. According to legend, they were the physical manifestation of great spirit beings who controlled the elements, such as wind, lightning and rain. During the Ngarrangarni or Dreaming, their actions and adventures shaped the landscape and helped create Indigenous law. At the end of creation time, they left their images on the rock faces and escarpments, in order to watch over the country and its Indigenous inhabitants, and to ensure the continuity of traditional law. Over milenia, the repainting of the Wandjina has become a sacred act of passage, connecting the Ngarinyin, Worrorra and Wunambal people in an unbroken link with both their ancestors and the Ngarrangarni.

The power of this ancestral connection, and indeed, the power ascribed to the imagery of the Wandjina, reflects the unique spiritual temporality of the Ngarrangarni or Dreaming. As W.E.H. Stanner notes, although the concept of the Dreaming evokes a heroic time when ancestral spirits roamed the earth, “one cannot ‘fix’ the Dreaming in time: it was, and is, everywhen … a kind of logos or principle of order transcending everything significant for Aboriginal men.” The essence of Ngarrangarni runs through all things and connects every point in time and space. Adherence to its fundamental and mystical truths is the driving force for senior Indigenous people like Ward, shaping their lives and world-view. It is this essence that explains the power ascribed to the image of the Wandjina. This is not only a spiritual and elemental power – such as the power to bring on rain in Perth, hundreds of miles from their ancestral homelands – but also their power as profound visual statements that challenge our western preconceptions of time, space, aesthetics and value.

Lucy Ward began painting in 2003 and has since established herself as one of the leading contemporary painters of the Wandjina. She has exhibited throughout Australia, as well as in Asia, Europe and America, and has held eight solo exhibitions through Mossenson Galleries in Perth, Melbourne and Sydney. Her works are held in several important public collections, including the Art Gallery of Western Australia, the Western Australian Museum, the Berndt Museum of Anthropology at the University of Western Australia and Macquarie University. In 2006 she was awarded the City of Stirling Art Award, and she has been a finalist in numerous major art prizes, including the Telstra National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art Awards, the Wynne Prize, the Arthur Guy Memorial Painting Prize, The Alice Prize and the Waterhouse Natural History Prize.

In the jubilant glow of Ward’s paintings there is a reflection on her long life lived in the Kimberley. She was born around 1920 at Ngarangarri country – the land of the Honey Dream – in what is now known as Beverley Springs Station. Her mother died while Ward was still an infant, so her father carried her around the bush in a bark coolamon, before finding a woman who was breastfeeding a little boy. According to Ward, “That little boy and I went share for her ngaman (milk), She was a good woman. That is why I am still alive today.”

Ward’s childhood was spent traversing the Ngarangarri and Winyiduwa clan estates with her father and grandfather. From these old men, she gained first-hand knowledge of the hunter-gather lifestyle: hunting kangaroo, emu, fish and prawns and gathering yam and edible water lilies. They also introduced her to the ancient artistic practices of the Ngarinyin, and she recalls fondly watching them paint “the really Wandjina in the caves.” As she matured, Ward worked on the burgeoning Kimberley cattle stations, both as a domestic servant and well as mustering and tailing cattle. But the formative experiences of her childhood remained with her, and during the wet season, when monsoonal rains locked the cattle industry down, Ward and her Ngarinyin kin would return to their ancestral estates for ceremony and to tend to their country.

Like her life, Ward’s paintings are a balance of sorrow and joy. In many of her canvases, a single Wandjina is painted in isolation, surrounded by swathes of colourful dotted squares, signifying the ‘sugarbag’ or bush-honey pod. According to Ward, in the Ngarrangarni, this Wandjina broke with traditional law, and took another man’s promised wife. This angered the man’s family, who pursued him across the country, seeking to punish him for this indiscretion. They finally caught him in Ngarangarri country, where he was beaten, speared and killed. From his prostrate body rose the sugarbag trees, making Ngarangarri country the land of honey. It is a powerful story of the connection of all things. In death there is creation; in punishment there is redemption; in the bitterness of tears, the sweetness of honey.

This sense of connectivity can be seen even more clearly in Lucy Ward’s signature image of ngara (the sugarbag). Ngara refers to the honey made by the stingless native bees. There are two types of bees native to the north-west Kimberley, the tree-dwelling bee (Waningga) and those that build their hives in rocks (Namri). Ngara is an important totem for Lucy Ward – not only was she born in Ngarangarri (the land of the Honey Dream), but according to Ward, she was also born under the shade of a sugarbag tree. Along with the image of the Wandjina, the sugarbag has been one of Ward’s defining motifs. However, whilst Ward’s depictions of Wandjina have remained relatively unchanging – undoubtedly due to the sacred nature of the image – the sugarbag has provided her with a motif of incredible flexibility. Over her diverse artistic career, it has been an endlessly malleable aesthetic form, in which she has found a seemingly boundless array of conceptual and aesthetic variations. Ward’s gallery representative, Dr Diane Mossenson, notes with amazement Ward’s “capacity for artistic re-invention. Unlike many Aboriginal artists who paint a limited number of images, Lucy has remained strong to her stories, but she continually recreates the imagery, finding new ways to express her stories.”

During his fieldwork in the Kimberley in the early 1960s, anthropologist Ian Crawford noted several rock-art sites in which the sugarbag motif was prominent. Reproduced in his landmark 1968 volume Art of the Wandjina, the cave paintings of sugarbags are clear artistic precursors to Ward’s early paintings. Like her Wandjina, this comparison reveals how much Ward’s work takes its core inspiration from her rock-art heritage. This etymology is easily overlooked in Ward’s work, particularly in light of the explosive acrylic palette favoured in her early paintings.

Like the cave paintings of sugarbags, Ward’s earliest depictions show the sugarbag motif as distinct, individual objects. Each honey pod is depicted as an irregular square or circle filled with coloured dots. Sometimes these squares or circles are sub-divided, while in other cases they are not. In late 2005, however, a major development began to occur in Ward’s portrayal of sugarbags. The sugarbag became an increasingly open signifier, whose individual unity slowly disappeared. In her most recent works, such as the monumental diptych Ngara (Sugarbag) Story 2008, exhibited at the Arthur Guy Memorial Art Prize, any sense of this indivisible unity has been shattered in favour of an all-over dotting that covers the canvas in a pulsating invocation of the aerial landscape.

There are many probable reasons for this development. One reason is certainly Ward’s exposure to artworks outside her immediate cultural experience. In 2006, Ward visited Melbourne for the launch of her exhibition Ngarrangarni Manambarra. During her visit, she attended the National Gallery of Victoria, where she was given a guided tour by senior curator Judith Ryan. Ward was particularly taken with both the style and scale of Clifford Possum Tjapaltjarri and Tim Leura Tjapaltjarri’s monumental Napperby Death Spirit Dreaming 1980. Following the visit, she repeatedly expressed her desire to work on larger canvases, referring back to the Tjapaltjarri’s canvas as an example. In the proceeding months, Ward not only completed several larger canvases, including the majestic 2007 Wandjinas in Ngarangarri Country (198 x 298 cm) which was exhibited in the 2008 Telstra National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art Awards, but Ward began to cover much larger sections of her canvas in shimmering dot-work, creating constellation like backgrounds to her tableaus of Wandjina, sugarbags and country.

On a more local level, 2005 also saw the arrival of another profound artistic influence on Ward’s work. In that year, the senior Nyikina artist Loongkoonan began painting at the same Derby based workshop as Ward. Although belonging to a different language group, Ward and Loongkoonan began a highly competitive and influential artistic relationship. Painting alongside each other, they became like a Braque and Picasso of the Kimberley – taking on the visual lessons of each other’s work, and continually challenging each other to find new ways of developing their very different painterly practices.

Despite these external prompts, however, Ward’s development has shown a clear and uniquely personal epistemic trajectory. In the paintings of Lucy Ward, each mark upon the canvas is like a fingerprint, betraying the trace of its creator’s movement. In painting her ancestral homelands, her marks revel her ownership of the country, like footprints in a landscape that she has traversed by foot, understood instinctively and known intimately. But just like a footprint, they exist as the memory of presence, a nostalgic echo of past travels.

In the wake of colonial incursion, elders like Ward cannot live on their traditional lands, but return only occasionally to tend to the country of which they are the sacred custodians. Returning to her sacred sites, Ward sings out to the spirits, warning them of her arrival. Her song echoes through the stony ridges and it is as though she is a young woman again. It is this memory of the landscape that reveals itself in Ward’s paintings. Each mark connects Ward to her landscape, making her one with the Dreams, songs and topography of her land of honey.

In this context, the sugarbag is a profound tripartite symbol for the personal (as Ward’s totem), the physical (the bush honey pod) and the spatial (Ngarangarri country: the land of the sugarbag dream). In shattering the individual unity of the sugarbag – literally opening it up – Ward fuses these three categories. Rather than fingerprints, the dots meld into a pointillist landscape that shimmers into being with a cosmological unity.

These seemingly abstract shapes thus become a complex metaphor for the inter-relationship of identity, culture and country. They are part of a sacred and personal geography that Marcia Langton has termed ‘placedness.’ For Ward, the past is not, as L.P. Hartley has famously suggested, ‘a foreign country’, but rather a familiar country that situates and unites all moments in time. Ward’s paintings become what Langton has described as “site markers of the remembering process and of identity itself.” They inhabit a temporality that is neither past, present nor future, but part of the sacred link that connects Lucy Ward to the timeless Ngarrangarni.

Mina Mina Jukurrpa: Kelly Napanangka Michaels & Alma Nangala Robertson

2010-05-17T01:25:00.000-07:00

Far to the west of the remote Indigenous community of Yuendumu, in the distant reaches of the Tanami Desert, lies one of the most important ceremonial sites for the women of the Warlpiri. Mina Mina is a sacred landscape made up of two large clay-pans guarded by a feathery sentinel of desert oaks, where, in the Jukurrpa (Dreamtime) a series of karlangu (digging sticks) emerged from the ground. Taking up these sticks, a large group of ancestral women began a heroic journey north to Jayinki and then eastward through Alcoota country. Marching in joyous exultation, their paths shaped the landscape, permeating it with the spirit of their songs. According to the Warlpiri, the spindly desert oaks at Mina Mina are an embodiment of these first digging sticks and of the ancestral women who brandished them.

The story of Mina Mina is of profound spiritual sustenance to the Warlpiri. It helps explain the genesis of the landscape, and circumscribes their relationship to it. Despite being over 300 kilometres from Yuendumu, it remains an important site of ceremonial and custodial obligations. Not surprisingly, it has also been one of the great sources of artistic inspiration for Warlpiri women. At the hands of Yuendumu’s great chroniclers it has revealed itself in a myriad of ways; some artists have chosen to focus on the desert oaks (Kurrkara), others the hair-string skirts (Majarrdi)worn during ceremony, others still have focussed on the edible fungus (Jinti-parnta) or vine (Ngalyipi) first collected by the ancestral travellers. Combined, these stories create a stunning vision of place, united by the indelible spiritual identification that is felt by the Warlpiri, and in particular those of the Napangardi/Japangardi and Napanangka/Japanangka sub-sections, for whom this place resonates with personal significance.

In contrast to the other early epicentres of desert painting, such as Papunya and Lajamanu, the painting movement at Yuendumu did not coalesce around senior men, but began in 1983 through the efforts of a group of senior Warlpiri women. Encouraged by the anthropologist Françoise Dussart, the women helped forge the dynamic ’Yuendumu style’, which, as Judith Ryan has noted, was “characterised by vibrant colour, large brush-strokes and an almost messy, gestural freedom.” In 1985, the artists formed Warlukurlangu Artists Aboriginal Corporation, through which they have refined the style, adding a level of accomplishment and elegance, while retaining the intensity of colour and spontaneity of design that defined the early movement. Subsequent generations of Yuendumu women have gained international acclaim as artists, including Maggie and Judy Napangardi Watson, Bessie Nakamarra Sims and Betsy Napangardi Lewis. Despite generational change and aesthetic transformation, the presence of Mina Mina in Warlpiri art has remained an iconic constant.

It is this legacy that is taken up in the paintings of Kelly Napanangka Michaels and Alma Nangala Robertson. Born in the late 1960s, Michaels (b.1965) and Robertson (b.1969) heard the Jukurrpa stories from their elders, and saw them painted with passion and dedication by their artistic forebears. Now, they pass these stories onto their children and grandchildren, retelling them in a kaleidoscopic explosion of colour. The influence of their elders runs through their work; the dominant iconographies of Warlpiri painting are clearly present, as is the characteristic Yuendumu palette of pinks, mauves, purples and blues. However,this is not a slavish form of imitation. In the paintings of Michaels and Robertson, influence exists as an aesthetic undercurrent that bubbles to the surface like the spiritual residue of the ancestors that informs the landscape. The influence of their artistic precursors becomes a song that infuses the canvas, filling it with the authority of cultural continuity and uniting it with the performative actions of song and ceremony that connect the Warlpiri to the Jukurrpa.

In Michaels’ depictions of Mina Mina, two key elements of the story dominate: the ceremonial dancing skirts (Majarrdi) and the edible fungus (Jinti-parnta) collected by the women on their journey. Majarrdi and Jinti-parnta are painted with a jutting angular intensity, which makes them appear to quiver across the canvas. Using extremes of contrasting colours (including a distinctive use of black and white outlines), Michaels creates a fluttering tension between foreground and background that makes the Majarrdi appear to float above the canvas as though suspended by invisible dancers. This creates an ethereal sense of spiritual presence, while the thickly painted ground of the canvas anchors them to the temporal materiality of the landscape.

Like her artistic precursors, Maggie and Judy Napangardi Watson, Robertson’s focus is the sacred Ngalyipi vine and the desert oaks (Kurrkara). Her paintings are swirling evocations of the landscape that shuttle between the narrative of travel and the fixed nature of place. Meandering lines sink into the landscape, evoking the residue of ancestral travels that simmer below the surface. Mina Mina pulsates in a spiral of colour that alludes to the constant spiritual undercurrents of ancestral travels, which shape and inform this place.

In drawing attention to this continuity of ancestral presence, both Michaels and Robertson testify to the continuing power of the Dreaming – a power that runs through all things, and unites all time and place. In their paintings, culture, aesthetics, history and place unite in a joyful continuum of colour and song. The Jukurrpa of Mina Mina is carried forward; its transformative power is expressed in an artistic evolution that pays homage to the past, while presenting a new vision for the future. On these fresh tongues, the exultant songs of the ancestral women are given new breath, proclaiming the creative power of Mina Mina for future generations.

Mina Mina Jukurrpa: Kelly Napanangka Michaels & Alma Nangala Robertson is on display at Mossenson Galleries in Perth, Western Australia from 1 June - 4 July 2010.

Emerging Elders at the National Gallery of Australia

2010-04-30T04:43:00.000-07:00

Below is the extended version of a review that first appeared in Art Guide Australia. Emerging Elders is on display at the National Gallery of Australia until 14 June 2010

As the Indigenous art movement has developed in Australia, it has continually been refreshed, renewed and reinvigorated by the appearance of new, elderly artists. Whilst this has been something of a unique feature to Indigenous art, it follows a certain internal logic. It is these older artists who remain closest to the pre-colonial cultural traditions which make Indigenous art unique, and, as Indigenous culture places a premium on seniority, it is these ‘elder’ artists with the greatest cache of cultural knowledge to draw upon. The Indigenous art market, in particular, has helped reify the notion of ‘elder’, making it a common refrain of commercial gallery sales pitches, in which each and every geriatric Aboriginal artist is carefully positioned as a profound repository of arcane spiritual and cultural knowledge.

Unfortunately, this simple reification of age does not accurately reflect traditional Indigenous power systems, which are based on far more complicated stratifications of ceremonial knowledge, clan affiliations, gender, custodial rights and responsibilities. The reduction of cultural seniority to the egalitarian category of ‘elder’ fails to recognise the personalities and backgrounds of individual artists. Just because an artist is elderly, it does not necessarily follow that they are an Elder in a ceremonial, custodial or leadership capacity.

This may seem like a pedantic point – particularly in relation to an exhibition as gloriously celebratory as Emerging Elders. And yet, it points towards a profound disjunction between traditional Indigenous cultural and aesthetic values, and the art market. On the one hand, the market supposes to hail the continuation of culture – celebrating Indigenous art for its ‘stories’ and cultural knowledge. On the other hand, it is often not the most culturally important works or artists who are most popular in the marketplace. In some instances, senior artists work is considered too ethnographic or rigidly traditional for a market which prefers bold, individual expressionism. In other cases, the more culturally knowledgable artists work across too many styles or stories – something which gives them great kudos amongst their peers, but is less attractive to a marketplace that favours easily identifiable ‘trademark’ designs.

These are questions that overshadow the reception of Indigenous art. They are questions in dire need of address if non-Indigenous Australians are to begin to have any meaningful engagement with Indigenous art. They are not insurmountable questions, but ones which require a patient, careful and considered cross-cultural dialogue on aesthetics and value.

Despite being evoked in the exhibition’s title, however, these urgent questions are not answered in Emerging Elders. First and foremost, Emerging Elders is a celebration of contemporary masterworks from the National Gallery of Australia’s collection. Like the Gallery’s 2007 Triennial of Indigenous Art, it lavishly showcases the institution’s ongoing commitment to collecting and exhibiting the finest examples of contemporary Indigenous art. Indeed, many of the nation’s leading artists are represented with major works. Gulumbu Yunupingu’s shimmering bark paintings of Garak, The Universe make a majestic centrepiece to the exhibition. And yet, their presence inevitably causes one to question the category of ‘emerging’. Gulumbu is a former winner of the Telstra National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art Awards, her designs adorn the ceiling of the Musee du Quai Branly in Paris and in 2006 she was awarded the Deadly Award for Visual Arts. By every possible standard, Gulumbu is an established and major figure in Australian art. The same could be said of many of the artists in Emerging Elders – such as Ningura Napurrula, Shorty Jangala Robertson or Dorothy Napangardi – who have all had long and distinguished careers. Others seem to have emerged to the very point of over-exposure, such as the prolific Bentinck Island Elder Mirdidingkingathi Juwarnda Sally Gabori, who has been a ubiquitous presence in recent Indigenous art exhibitions.

But perhaps more confusing, is the inclusion of artists whose position as ‘elders’ seems less assured. Anmatyerre painter Billy Benn Perrurle is represented with a monumental depiction of his homelands Artetyerre, whose glissandos of overlapping brushwork brilliantly reveal his development from a painter of small, delicate landscapes into a rugged, De Kooning like expressionist. In another room, a large canvas by Tiwi artist Timothy Cook shows the artist finding a new maturity – balancing his typically idiosyncratic sense of form with the addition of fine over-dotting. The work retains the raffish charm of Cook’s early paintings, but tempers it with a sense of cosmological delicacy. And yet, whilst both works are indisputable highlights of the exhibition, as outsider artists, neither Cook nor Benn properly fit the mould of ‘elder’ in the sense of cultural knowledge, leadership or responsibility. Both artists belong to communities from which there are both older and more culturally senior artists. One surmises, they have been included for their artistic rather than cultural pre-eminence. In this sense, they seem to fit neither categories of ‘emerging’ nor ‘elder.’

It is the artists who fit most comfortably into both categories whose voices speak most commandingly in Emerging Elders. Born in 1928, Harry Tjutjuna of Ernabella is represented with a spectacular depiction of the Wangka (Spiderman) Tjukurpa. Glowing in an incandescent haze of orange, red, yellow and black, it is like a grand, pop-art rendering of an ancient Dream. It speaks with a bold visual inventiveness that asserts its presence and the authority of knowledge it contains.

Other works speak just as authoritatively, but in a hushed voice, whose gentle overtones whisper of a different time and place. Kimberley elder Alan Griffiths painting of dancers engaged in the Mindarr and Waringarr ceremonies bristles with the action of a giant carnival while locking into an ancient schemata that fills it with a still, silent nostalgia for past times. Elizabeth ‘Queenie’ Giblet’s Pa’anmu (Headbands) for Laura Festival evokes a faded memory of ancient ceremonial markings through her understated and elegant use of grey, black and white. These works conjure the air of a passing epoch – a time when the ceremony ground would fall silent in anticipation of the Elders’ command. And yet, they also show the continuing power of this voice in contemporary art. They show how the Elders’ voice can continually emerge, to be reshaped into dynamic and relevant contemporary statements. It is these works with the power to once again strike us silent with awe.

Jukurrtjanu Mularrarringu (From the Dreaming): Meaning and Movement in the Art of Nora Wompi

2010-04-30T04:36:00.001-07:00

With their thick, viscous skeins of impasto paint, the paintings of Nora Wompi seem to melt onto the eye. Layers of overlapping colours blur, making forms difficult to define; the desert landscape shimmers into being, like a mirage upon the horizon. Despite abandoning her searing palette of reds, orange and pinks Wompi’s work has lost none of its blazing desert intensity. Meandering tracks of paint roll rhythmically across the canvas, creating a dynamic, anamorphic topography. The movement of the artist’s hand is clearly visible in the thick brushstrokes, which run across the canvas like trails in the wilderness. The encrusted dots of early works have given way to broad swathes of shifting colour. Where the early works had a gravelly sense of place that evoked the material presence of the landscape, Wompi’s recent works present a peripatetic, nomadic understanding of space.

In the past five years, Wompi’s paintings have increased in both scale and confidence. Her development has not been a process of metamorphosis, so much as a form of artistic excavation, stripping away the crust to reveal the metaphysical essence of the landscape. Her latest works are less concerned with the visible features of the landscape than with its underlying spiritual meanings. They are paintings of experience, not cynical or world-weary, but acutely aware of the truth of the matter, of what is permanent and what fades away.

Exploring this intangible essence has required Wompi to develop a unique abstract visual language. The clearly identifiable iconography of desert painting – with its recognisable symbols for waterholes, campsites and rockholes – has slowly been replaced with a more fluid, gestural style. The specificity of particular places, stories and sites has given way to grand, totalised renderings of her country around Kunnawarritji. These are ‘big pictures’ that require a ‘big picture’ approach. The spiritual essence that they seek to capture cannot be described using a predetermined lexicon of signs, but requires the development of an artistic language based on emotion and intuition.

It is important to note that for Wompi, this visual language is not something simply imagined or ‘made up’. Although intangible, the essence of landscape that Wompi’s paintings address is very real. It is a spirituality revealed through a close connection and understanding of her ancestral country. It is only through a long and intimate association with the landscape that these mysteries are revealed. This revelation is described in her native Kukatja tongue as jukurrtjanu mularrarringu – the truth that comes from the Dreaming. It is from the Dreaming that everything of value or significance derives.

Born around 1935 at Lilbaru near Well 33 on the Canning Stock Route, Wompi belongs to a fading generation of senior Indigenous people who grew up in the desert, learning the solemn codes of the nomadic lifestyle. Consistent with this nomadic outlook, her biography is defined by significant movements: walking with her mother to Bililuna Station and then onto Balgo Mission; relocating to Fitzroy Crossing with her second husband Cowboy Dick; returning to Kunnawarritji with her sisters at the dawn of the homelands movement. Although aged in her seventies, Wompi maintains a highly transitory lifestyle, moving regularly between Kunnawarritji, Balgo, Kiwirrkurra and Punmu in order to visit relatives and attend to familial obligations.

In the nomadic concept of country, places are not understood in isolation, but rather through their intersections and connections. In Indigenous cosmology, this reveals itself through the songlines that run across the country, uniting all places. These paths reflect the ancestral mythology of the Dreaming, when spirit beings traveled across the landscape creating its sacred sites and leaving their residue in the landscape. According to Indigenous beliefs, this sacred essence remains in the landscape, and is discernible to those whose kinship or custodial ties allow them to access it.

It is this pervasive presence that Wompi explores in her paintings. In their sinuous pathways, we see an organic lattice of places, each connected, rolling into each other like tali or sandhills. Each gestural mark upon the canvas is like a footprint, revealing its creator’s presence. Like a footprint, they exist as the memory of presence – a nostalgic echo of past travels, both personal and ancestral. Judith Ryan has characterized this as a “haptic quality … calling sites and spiritual associations through touch.” This touch connects Wompi’s knowledge and custodianship of the land to that of her ancestors; her movement on the canvas becomes a mythopoetic recollection of all the spiritual travels that underpin her country. At the same time, it overlays her own journey – both physical and artistic – onto these paths, creating a palimpsest that connects the past and present.

In doing so, Wompi’s paintings create a matrix that unites all time and place. They paint the history of her landscape, as it is transcribed by ancient songlines and transgressed by more recent paths, such as the Canning Stock Route, which, during Wompi’s lifetime, brought European settlers into the world of the Kukatja. These settlers could not see the landscape, access its sacred powers or read its songlines. But perhaps this is the very point of Wompi’s paintings. As their lines of colour spill outwards to the edge of the painting, it is almost as though they are trying to break free of the canvas, to pour out from Kunnawarritji to the world. As they reach the edge, they ask us to see the majesty outside the canvas – to realize that this mystical essence is part of the great continuum of existence. This is a unique gift; an intercultural exchange that offers both an expansive lesson in Indigenous cosmology and a critique of our own visual nescience. Painted lovingly and passionately by a powerful, individualistic woman, they project a unique understanding of the world. In their beauty and grace, they offer a guidebook that invites us to feel the indelible essence of this sacred land.

Nora Wompi's Solo Exhibition is presented by Suzanne O'Connell Gallery at 45 Downstairs from Tue 27 Apr 10 to Sat 8 May 10 2010.

Bob Gibson Tjungurrayi

2010-04-26T22:01:00.000-07:00

In a haze of incandescent orange and green, a series of concentric squares pulsate with the searing heat of the Western Desert. The colours meld and overlap, creating a transparency of paint that flutters across the ground of the painting. These are the designs of the Tingari ceremony – secret men’s business that takes place near the remote community of Tjukurla on the edge of Lake Hopkins. Each square is roughly painted, revealing the artist’s hand as it moves with a gestural intensity across the canvas, giving them a pulsating irregularity. These works sing of the majesty of the Western desert with a tongue rough-hewn by the shifting sands.

Bob Gibson Tjungarrayi was born at Papunya in 1974, before moving with his family to Tjukurla during the time of the homelands movement. The son of renowned artist Mary Gibson, Bob paints his ancestral stories with a raw intensity. His palette of wild hues reveals an unrestrained joy for experimentation, tempered with nostalgia as he recalls his father’s country around Patjarr and his mother’s country of Kulkuta.

In Bob Gibson’s paintings, the raw, physical experience of country is transmuted into paint. Underpinning this representation is the attendant spiritual and cultural knowledge that informs the Anangu view of the landscape. Gibson’s works are not simply unmediated depictions of country, but integrated and resolved extensions of cultural knowledge. His works are filled with uncanny, indefinable artistic allusions – whether the rigid Tingari of Ronnie Tjampitjinpa, the dense over-painting of Lorna Fencer Napurrula or the fiery brushwork of Johnny Warangkula Tjupurrula. Each is transformed into Gibson’s personal style. The artist’s hand becomes an expression of the cultural continuum, picking up on a wealth of knowledge and influence, and using it to create something entirely new.

The Dreamings that underpin Gibson’s ancestral country are brought forward via his unique painterly style. This double-take between the familiar and the idiosyncratic is the central tension that drives the work. This distinction between the shared/communal cultural experience and the highly personalised artistic vision – between the iconic and the aesthetic – creates a visual metaphor for the difference between ‘seeing’ the country and ‘knowing’ the country. This latter form of viewing is not the unmediated sight of the tourist or visitor, but rather, the informed understanding of an initiated viewer. It sees beyond the physical manifestations of the landscape, focusing instead on the underlying spiritual dimension. This is why, under Gibson’s hand, the Dreaming sites at Lake Hopkins can be portrayed in such a myriad of ways, each revealing a different aspect of this sacred geography.

For the Western viewer this is a highly challenging visual problem. After four decades of the Aboriginal art movement, there has developed a familiarity with the classic iconographies of desert painting, along with its predominant artistic styles. Some may even consider themselves ‘connoisseurs’ of Aboriginal art, able to rattle off the names of collectible artists from every corner of the country. And yet, what is this but the superficial frosting of a market driven appetite? Perhaps all we can see are brush-strokes on the canvas, the expressions of a profound knowledge of which we will never truly comprehend. The secrets of the Tingari remain hidden.

In the work of Bob Gibson we find an invitation. Gibson’s paintings are all about inter-relation; of colour and form, of tension, reaction and interplay; the challenge of raw brushstrokes against flat planes of colour. They are a celebration of individual expression within the cultural continuum. In doing so, they ask us to question the nature the aesthetic, the very ways in which ancient iconographies can be remodeled and innovated, and show us how one artist can create a unique artistic statement, while remaining true to their ancient cultural knowledge.

Choosing Who Will Keep the Stories Strong: The Garrawurra Artists of Milingimbi

2010-04-21T02:07:00.000-07:00

The following article appeared in Artlink, Vol 29, no. 3, 2009

In the wake of the Federal Government’s 2007 Emergency Intervention in the Northern Territory, negative portrayals have dominated media coverage of remote Indigenous communities. Reports of violence and substance abuse have been held as symptomatic of the breakdown of Indigenous family structures and the annihilation of Indigenous culture. This narrative has spilt into art criticism, where the works of senior Indigenous men and women are often viewed through the prism of a cultural mausoleum. In a discourse steeped in the melancholy longing for lost authenticity, each mark upon the canvas is framed as the last glimpse of a fading world.

This is the story of group of contemporary Indigenous artists on the small island of Milingimbi, off the coast of central Arnhem Land. It is not a story of cultural annihilation, but rather, one of renewal. It shows the resilience and adaptability traditional Indigenous family systems, and how one community has internally guided transformations in familial and clan relationships in order to meet their changing needs in the modern world.

In early 2006, the renowned Liyagauwumirr painter Mickey Durrng Garrawurra passed away in his home on Milingimbi. For many years, Durrng (1940-2006) and his brother Tony Dhanyala (1935-2004) were the only people authorised to paint the Liyagauwumirr’s most important clan designs: the Djirri-didi painted on the body during the Ngarra cleansing ceremony. There is a refined elegance to these designs: at their simplest they consist of nothing more than a series of austere horizontal bands of yellow, red and white. To the Liyagauwumirr, however, they contain all the mysteries of their ancestral homelands. According to Durrng, “These designs are the power of the land. The sun, the water, creation, for everything.”1 Rich in ‘inside’ meanings, the full ‘story’ contained within these designs was traditionally known only to initiated Liyagauwumirr men. Before his death, however, Durrng made the seemingly unorthodox decision to pass this knowledge and authority to his sister Ruth Nalmakarra (b.1954) and her family. What followed was a flowering of tradition, as Nalmakarra and her sisters used this broadened authority to instigate a cultural revival that united their community around these ancient designs.

The striking visual power of the Djirri-didi first came to widespread attention in the early 1990s, when Durrng began painting them on bark. His combination of strict geometries and flat-plane fields of colour was in marked contrast to the fluidity and fine cross-hatching for which much Arnhem Land art was admired. As Djon Mundine has noted, Durrng’s work was met with a mixed critical response, with many curators, collectors and critics claiming that his paintings looked “too modern.”2 In some cases, the crispness and formal order of Durrng’s barks was mistaken as a calculated acquiescence to the aesthetic of late-modernist abstraction. In other instances, it was simply that his cool contemporaneity was out of step with an art market that festishised the primitive.

But Durrng’s primary concern was always tradition and continuity, as opposed to any aspirations towards modernism. Although ‘modern’ in appearance, his designs adhered strictly to those painted on the body during the Ngarra ceremony. Ostensibly a mortuary rite performed to remember the dead and to prepare their spirits for the afterlife, the Ngarra ceremony is also a celebration of regeneration and renewal that recalls the ancestral travels of the Dja’nkawu Sisters. According to legend, during creation time, the two sisters Dhalkuwrrngawy and Barradawy crossed the landscape giving birth to the first people of the Dhuwa moiety. The sisters created the Dhuwa’s clans, languages, names, ceremonies and customs. During the Ngarra ceremony, the Liyagauwumirr paint their bodies and ceremonial objects in the tri-colour of Miku (red), Watharr (white) and Buthjalak (yellow) in recollection of the Dja’nkawu Sisters’ travels. The participants hands are painted white to signify the Sisters’ landing on the mainland at Yalangbara (near Groote Eylandt), while other markings symbolise key moments on their journey, such as sites at Garriyak and Dhambala, where they created sacred waterholes by piercing the ground with their digging sticks.

Chris Durkin recalls vividly the first time he met Mickey Durrng. Fresh from a tenure as a field-officer for Papunya Tula Artists, in 2005 Durkin was employed by the Milingimbi Council to re-establish an art centre on the island. As an artist at the end of his life, Durrng was desperate to continue recording his stories and designs. The artist approached the newly appointed arts coordinator saying, “I’m Mickey and I’m a famous artist. I’ve had exhibitions in Paris and London. You’ve got to give me materials to paint.”3 Through the auspices of the new Milingimbi Art Centre, Durkin began providing the ailing artist with materials so that he could produce what would be his final body of work.

As Durrng’s health deteriorated, Durkin got to know the artist’s extended family. Durrng was one of the last senior men of the great Garrawurra family of ‘seven fathers’. Durrng’s grandfather sired seven sons, of whom Durrng’s father Nupurray Garrawurra was the youngest. An artist in his own right, Nupurray fathered around 10 children of his own, including the artists Margaret Rarru (b.1940), Lena Walunydjanalil (b.1944) and Helen Ganalmirrawuy (b.1955). After the death of his elder brother Madanggala Garrawurra, Nupurray also raised his brother’s children, which included Ruth Nalmakarra.

In the often-patriarchal systems of Indigenous law, Durrng’s decision to pass clan authority to his sister may seem like a drastic measure, indicative of the breakdown of family structures and the lack of male role-models. In reality, the reasons for Durrng’s actions are far more complex. Firstly, by chance, both Madanggala and Nupurray fathered more daughters than sons, meaning that Mickey’s generation was dominated by women. More importantly, however, the decision was based on a considered concern for the survival of these stories. Ruth Nalmakarra explains:

Elders have a responsibility to choose who should take over the leadership to carry on the stories. It happens this way because people are passing every day, every month, every year. In that case, before they pass, they have to call on those people that they can choose to keep the stories strong. They look to people with strong feelings and a strong voice. They appoint them to know and to carry on the story.

The key responsibility for elders such as Durrng is to ensure they select the person best suited to keeping the stories strong. In the case of the Liyagauwumirr, it was not simply that there were no available men, but rather, that Durrng saw Nalmakarra as the best advocate for these stories. In his view, she was the strongest cultural person; more knowledgeable, committed and vocal than her surviving brothers. Moreover, it is important to note, that although these were traditionally ‘men’s’ stories, no cultural knowledge was lost in this transaction. Lindy Allen, Senior Curator of Northern Australian Indigenous Collections at Museum Victoria argues that often senior women’s knowledge of important ceremonial stories is underestimated: “They are not expected to speak about such things, but they often know them.”5

In October 2006, after a period of mourning for their brother, Nalmakarra and her sisters began to revive the clan designs that he had entrusted to them. Although many of the women were accomplished weavers, the gender restrictions on their clan designs meant that none had painted before. After tentative beginnings, soon a prolific outpouring of paintings began to emerge. Durkin recalls:

It was unforgettable! They left it for a while after Mickey’s death, but then all of a sudden all these paintings started coming in from everywhere. And they were not ordered or repetitive, but crazy, like they had been hanging out to paint them forever. There were so many amazing designs.
6

John von Sturmer has argued that in Yolngu art, “Every painting carries with it the claim or the assertion: ‘I am entitled to paint this.’”7 In Durrng’s work, this manifest itself in his commanding understatement; as though his aesthetic restraint alluded to the power withheld from his representations. In the women’s paintings this sense of entitlement was revealed quite differently. Where these works lacked the crisp precision of Durrng’s paintings, they replaced it with a keen sense of excitement, spontaneity and formal inventiveness. Whilst this was undoubtedly due in some part to their lack of training, Durkin argues that it was also indicative of their excitement at their new authority. He notes, “While big law-men often paint in a strict controlled manner, these works are about playing with the designs, having great passion that reflects love, enjoyment and family. The women are embracing the opportunity to own it, to be proud of it.”8

This is best illustrated in a comparison between Durrng and his sisters’ depiction of one of the key Liyagauwumirr stories: the Gapu Milminydjarrk or Waterholes at Garriyak. In Durrng’s depiction of the story, the waterholes are always evenly sized and spaced, gaining their charge from the contrast of light and dark colours in a rigid geometric order. In approaching the same design, his sister Lena Walunydjanalil abandons this sense of order, irregularly arranging her waterholes so that they pulsate unevenly across the bark in a movement that comes more from her use of line than from tonal contrast. Margaret Rarru, on the other hand, utilises the irregular shape of the bark as a springboard for her designs, creating a tension between frame and content as her forms appear to push outwards against the border. In 2007, one of Rarru’s works was awarded the bark painting prize at the Telstra National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art Awards. Helen Ganalmirrawuy maintains some of Durrng’s geometric order, but has developed a much busier and complex decorative schema that relies heavily on white outlines – a technique rarely seen in her brother’s work. In fact, of the sisters, it is Nalmakarra whose work remains the strictest adherent to tradition. Nalmakarra’s paintings maintain a stately restraint, and in some instances, such as her use of cross-hatching, appear to hark back to even older aesthetic modes. Durkin speculates that this strict adherence is a result of both Nalmakarra’s respect for her brother’s legacy, but also the intense sense of responsibility that she feels for these designs. According to Durkin, “She knows she must be beyond indictment.”9

In the variations of the Liyagauwumirr women, we see a cultural and epistemic moment when shifts in family structure result in the rapid influx of new approaches to a traditionally restricted and highly formalised mode of art production. Howard Morphy has noted, that although Indigenous geometric designs appear stable over time, in reality they are “the springboard for creativity and diversity … responsive to the subtleties of aesthetic practice and the parameters of possible variation.”10 For the non-Indigenous art historian – necessarily ignorant of the restricted ‘inside’ meanings of the Djirri-didi – this presents a singular moment for aesthetic engagement when judgements can be made upon precisely those elements with remain constant and those which are open to experimentation and change. In doing so, it suggests alternative critical methodologies which are responsive to both cultural continuity and aesthetic innovation. Put simply, as Nalmakarra clarifies, “There are different ways of painting and different patterns, but they mean the same thing. We know the stories, so we know which ones to choose.”11

If this broadening of cultural authority has created a unique moment for non-Indigenous engagement with Liyagauwumirr design, under Nalmakarra’s stewardship it has also been an important moment for engagement within the community at Milingimbi. With Durrng’s authority, Nalmakarra and her sisters have made their clan designs available to a wide range of Liyagauwumirr artists, including a younger generation of artists such as Susan Yirrawuy (b.1974), Jocelyn Gumirrmirr (b.1974), Angelica Bulurruwuy (b.1986) and Durrng’s son Robert Djawdjawku (b.1971). Not only has this kept the designs strong within the Liyagauwumirr, but it has provided an important economic and cultural outlet at Milingimbi. The biggest problem facing the community at Milingimbi, according to Durkin, is “a lack of meaningful engagement with the Balanda (non-Indigenous) world.” Whilst young people at Milingimbi have strong traditional culture, they struggle to find value for this knowledge in the wider world. Durkin continues, “The only way this can be reconciled is by employing people in culturally relevant ways, such as at the art centre and school.” And this is precisely what Nalmakarra hopes to achieve through painting the Djirri-didi:

We want the children to learn that it is important for their culture, it is important for their art to be alive. That is why we have the art centre: to keep the paintings that the old people passed onto us, to keep them alive so we can pass them on to the next generation.

1 Mickey Durrng, quoted in Brenda Westley and Steve Westley, ‘Mickey Durrng: Artist of East Arnhem Land’, Aboriginal Art Online, [http://www.aboriginalartonline.com/resources/articles2.php]
2 Djon Mundine, ‘The Native Born’ The Native Born: Objects and Representations from Ramingining, Arnhem Land, exhib. cat., Museum of Contemporary Arts, Sydney, 1996, p105.
3 Chris Durkin, phone interview 12 June 2009.
4 Ruth Nalmakarra, phone interview 29 May 2009.
5 Lindy Allen, interview, Melbourne Museum, Carlton, Victoria, 11 June 2009.
6 Chris Durkin, phone interview, 12 June 2009.
7 John von Sturmer, ‘A Limping World: Works in the Arnott’s Collection – Some Conceptual Underpinnings’, They Are Meditating: Barks from the MCA’s Arnott’s Collection, exhib. cat., Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, 2008, p.50.
8 Chris Durkin, phone interview 12 June 2009.
9 Chris Durkin, phone interview 12 June 2009.
10 Howard Morphy Becoming Art: Exploring Cross-Cultural Categories, University of NSW Press, Sydney 2008, p77.
11 Ruth Nalmakarra, phone interview 29 May 2009.
12 Chris Durkin, phone interview 12 June 2009.

Some Thoughts on the Paintings of Billy Kenda

2010-04-18T22:16:00.000-07:00

A truck screams across the desert. The heat belting down upon the asphalt makes it glow a deep, languid blue. The driver has his eyes fixed forward upon the road as it stretches out onto the horizon. His face bears a wobbly smile, as though absorbed in the rhythms of the latest catchy tune blaring on his car radio. Around him, the desert rises in glorious majesty; purple mountains ascend into a crimson sky that beams down upon the desert’s gleaming yellow sands. But the driver does not note this grandeur for he is transfixed by his journey, his eyes planted firmly on the highway as it speeds him to his destination.

For Billy Kenda, the desert landscape is a place of Arcadian splendour. His depictions of country are the sanguine songs of a contented heart; prelapsarian odes to his beloved desert idyll. Rolling hills recede into the picture plain, enveloping the viewer and drawing the eye inwards in a transitory recession. Born in 1972, Kenda began painting in 2004 through the auspices of Mwerre Anthurre Artists (Bindi Inc) in Alice Springs. His father was a Ngaatjatjarr man from Docker River, but Kenda’s paintings are dominated by his mother’s country near Jay Creek in the West MacDonnell Ranges. This is the country where Kenda was raised in the shadow of the purple hills made famous by Albert Namatjira, and in many ways, Kenda’s paintings continue the halcyon vision of his artistic forebear.

And yet, increasingly, Kenda’s landscapes have become dominated by motor vehicles. Cars and trucks speed across the landscape, blocking it, and drawing the viewer to the foreground of the image. At times, these vehicles dominate the picture, and the landscape becomes little more than a hurried, unfocussed blur at the edge of the canvas. In Kenda’s paintings, the motor vehicle becomes a metonym for the encroachment of western modernity upon the Indigenous cultural landscape, offering a subtle, but powerful critique of western vision and our reluctance to embrace or acknowledge an Indigenous view of the land.

It is in this sense that the comparison between Kenda and Namatjira is perhaps most apt, for it was in the works of Namatjira that western audiences were first exposed to an Indigenous vision of the landscape. In his depictions of country, Namatjira appropriated the western tradition of landscape painting as a means of empowering Indigenous perspective. As Ian Burn has noted, “The Arrente style may be interpreted as a strategy to control what is secret and what is sacred, while still expressing to a white audience an Aboriginal relationship to the land,” in order, as Galarrwuy Yunipingu continues “to demonstrate our continuing link with our country and our rights and responsibilities we have to it.” Namatjira’s paintings present a defiant call to see the landscape from an Indigenous viewpoint. In doing so, he helped inaugurate the Indigenous art movement which has gone on to be one of the dominant frontiers upon which Indigenous peopl e have engaged with modernity and shown their culture to be relevant, contemporary and strong.

Despite their apparent joviality, the work of Billy Kenda sits at a forceful critical intersection of this visual engagement with the hegemony of western vision. As western society spread into the heart of the nation, highways were built across the desert – Kenda’s traditional homeland. But highways are built upon the principle of fastest movement between origin and destination; upon the assumption that what lies between is unimportant. Margaret Morse has theorised that the car becomes the de-realised ‘non-space’ that allows us to negotiate this distance. In the interior of the motor vehicle the traveller is insulated from the outside world, achieving what Morse calls a ‘mobile privatisation’ that serves to displace or separate us from our surroundings. This contrasts severely with an Indigenous cosmology, in which it is songlines and not highways that run across the country connecting all places, people and things. In this worldview, travel becomes a process deeply connected to the landscape; a process of continuity, identity creation and placedness.

But the songlines of the highway are insular; disconnected. This is how Kenda depicts his drivers, absorbed in the detached world of their mobile cabin, bopping along in ignorant bliss to the enveloping beauty of the world around them. When cars are absent from Kenda’s landscapes, the landscape recedes into the picture plain, inviting the viewer to travel across Kenda’s country, to footwalk his hot sands, to taste the desert air and feel the heat upon one’s brow. The inclusion of cars refuses this engagement, pulling the landscape up flat and disallowing travel into the picture plain. Here we find the metaphor of Kenda’s paintings. They are a call to return to the landscape, to escape western vision and to actively see and engage with the world around us. Kenda’s paintings are a challenge to look beyond our assumptions; to see our blindness to the beauty of the world just beyond our frame of reference. For it is here, in the Arcadian splendour of the landscape that the real joy of Kenda’s paintings can be found and from which stems their unique vision and joyful contentment.

Peter Newry: History Paintings

2010-04-06T18:33:00.000-07:00

A series of meandering lines roll across the canvas. Each one wavers delicately, but determinedly, as it breaks through rich veins of fulvous ochre. This is Laargen, located deep within the Keep River National Park, where during the wet season, dozens of small creeks unite to become a gushing torrent of water that breathes life into the desert landscape. It is the ancestral country of the Miriwoong, and in Peter Newry’s painting, it is depicted with a majestic solemnity. Newry’s hand is one of dignified restraint; his marks dance on the canvas like an arcane calligraphy, each line a Zen-like meditation on time and space.

In Hitsuzendo, the Zen art of calligraphy, a single line can evoke an entire world of meaning. The aim is to reach Samaai: the unification of the individual with the highest reality. In the act of calligraphy, Zen masters focus intensely to become one with the meaning of the characters that they depict. In the paintings of Peter Newry, a similar focus can be found. The landscape pours from his brush in simple lines that cut across broad swathes of ochre, invoking both the spiritual essence and material presence of place.

As Darren Jorgensen has noted, Newry is one of the Kimberley’s most restrained minimalists, taking the already austere planar style of East Kimberley painting – popularised by artists like Rover Thomas and Paddy Bedford – and reducing it to an enigmatic sparsity. In western art and literature – from Sidney Nolan to Patrick White – the desert’s broad spaces induced fear as identity was dissolved amidst the oppressive infinity of the wilderness. For Newry, however, it is from these seemingly empty spaces that identity is revealed. Through his simple lines, the form of the landscape is evoked in absence. Landmarks are not so much depicted, as alluded to; space is evoked along cragged ridges, whose jutting edges speak of a long life in the Kimberley.

Peter Newry was born around 1939 at Newry Station in the East Kimberley, where he lived for the next fifty years. According to Newry, he “grew up on the back of a horse.” A skilled stockman, he worked on the station until the 1970s, after which he was employed in numerous hard labours, including picking cotton and working as a builder’s labourer during the construction of the township of Kununurra. Although an important cultural man of the Miriwoong, Newry approaches this role with a dignified humility, reticent to reveal too much of his knowledge to outsiders. The spiritual content of his work and the sacred places it depicts, is often left understated or unexplained in Newry’s paintings.

Nevertheless, it was the very task of recording his sacred geography that inspired Newry to commence painting in 2002. Newry was persuaded to commence painting by the late, great Gadjerriwoong artist Paddy Carlton (c.1926-2006), who extolled the importance of Newry recording his knowledge of his traditional country. Charged with this weighty task, Newry’s early works were frenetic cartographic exercises, as he attempted to depict vast areas of country in great detail. More recently, however, Newry has restricted himself to a smaller number of specific locations – those places with a profound personal resonance. These works are not so much about mapping, as becoming one with the country through painting. Newry is no longer attempting to produce encyclopaedic maps of Miriwoong country, but rather, trying to achieve a unity that embodies the landscape, becoming more realistic by its ability to transcend representation to embody the very essence of the landscape.

Newry describes these paintings as “history paintings.” For Newry, ‘history’ is a term filled with gravity; his use of it reflects the weight and seriousness with which he views his art practice. The history to which it refers is that of his Miriwoong country: the true stories of how places were made. In ascribing them the gravity of ‘history’, Newry confirms his paintings as stories told the ‘right way’, as they were passed down by his ancestors. And yet, this is not history painting in the western sense, for unlike his academic predecessors, the ‘history’ of Newry’s paintings is not something limited to the past, but rather, is continually unfolding. Unlike the paintings of David or Vernet, the history embedded in Newry’s paintings is not depicted, but revealed via the residual ancestral presence that sanctifies the landscape and connects it to the sacred Ngarrangarni or Dreaming.

According to Cathy Cummins, Manager of Waringarri Aboriginal Arts, “Peter Newry’s paintings invite us to acknowledge a level of understanding that is poetic, intelligent and deeply connected. At a time when Indigenous art teeters on the balance of what it has achieved and what more is possible Peter Newry stands up and reminds us that the land is poetry, it is history, it is the story of a culture whose truths are increasingly vulnerable.” In Newry’s paintings, we find a Zen-like unity with the landscape whose power derives from its temporal and spatial connection with Ngarrangarni. As he works to pass this knowledge onto his children, grandchildren and relatives at Waringarri Aboriginal Arts, Newry creates his own history, moving East Kimberley painting to profound new boundaries.

Peter Newry: History Paintings is on display at Mossenson Galleries, 41 Derby Street, Collingwood, Victoria from 7 April - 2 May 2010.

Jean Baptiste Apuatimi and Maria Josette Orsto

2009-12-13T02:59:00.001-08:00

According to legend, the Jilamara or Tiwi body paint designs date back to the time of the spirit ancestors. They were created for the very first Pukamani ceremony, performed to mark the death of the creation being Purukupali. This ceremony was performed to ensure that the Tiwi would not die, but be reincarnated, and marked the end of the Tiwi creation period. Although ostensibly a mortuary ritual, the Pukamani is as much about regeneration and renewal, as it is about death. The Tiwi are instructed to take great care with the traditions of the Jilamara, but are also encouraged to use it to celebrate the power of creativity. In many ways, this dichotomy is the key to understanding both the power of Tiwi art and the genius of Jean Baptiste Apuatimi.

The gravitas of Tiwi art first came to widespread attention in the late 1950s, with the collection of 17 magnificent Pukamani poles by Tony Tuckson for the Art Gallery of New South Wales. In the last decade, however, it has been Jean Baptiste Apuatimi who come to the fore as one of the tradition’s finest contemporary proponents and innovators. Born around 1940 at Pirlangimpi on Melville Island, she has forged forward with an unsurpassed skill for bold gesture, texture and colour; all signs of a confident artistry that derives from a lifetime of learning, watching the Jilamara used in ceremony and in the artwork of her late husband Declan Apuatimi.

This confidence allows Jean to balance formal investigation with a profound respect for cultural continuity. At the Tiwi Design art centre on Nguiu (Bathurst Island), Jean works surrounded by younger artists: her daughter Maria Josette Orsto and relatives Ita Tipungwuti, Margaret Renee Kerinauia and Roslyn Ortso. Sitting with Jean, these young women learn not just pwanga amintiya marlipinyini (dots and lines), but also the importance of originality; the expression of personality within these designs. Anyone who has ever witnessed the diminutive power of Jean performing her Jarrangini (Buffalo) dance, knows that she has a personality with the force of nature.

But like the Jarrangini dance, Jean’s work is about balance and tension. The essence of her practice might be seen in one of her most distinctive designs; Jikapayinga. Depicted as an irregular grid of squares, Jikapayinga refers to a female crocodile. It is a design that balances unity and individuality; each square is a unique object, but the power of the design comes from their interaction – the rhythmic ebb and flow as each square relates to its neighbour in part of a larger, more important narrative. In doing so, Jikapayinga creates a visual metaphor for the role of the individual within a greater tradition. And this is, indeed the key to Jean’s paintings. Jean Baptiste Apuatimi is a true master working in an ancient mode; she is an singular artist whose work gains its power by summoning up all the spirits of her ancestors, influences and progenitors. In doing so, she creates the truly individual vision of a world-class artist.

Kirrily Hammond: Swoon

2009-09-09T20:40:00.000-07:00

It is a crisp summer evening in Alpine Victoria. Across the vista, the dusk clouds roll in, changing the light from a gentle mauve into a rich dark blue. Soon nightfall will turn the clouds into a shapeless darkness upon the horizon, but for now each one is trimmed with a brilliant glow, as though they have been delicately edged by a heavenly seamstress. For one passing moment the world is still.

As I recall this scene, I am immediately struck by the dull inadequacy of language to describe such majesty. How could any representation, be it literary or painterly, capture the profound, haptic experience of being in nature? How could a painting evoke the encompassing awe that causes one to swoon in the face of the sublime?

Over the past fifteen years, Kirrily Hammond has explored many different landscapes in her paintings, prints and drawings. Her early works reveled in a fantasy world of the imagination, in which anamorphic trees jostled with ethereal spirits and circus ghouls. More recently, however, she has found her inspiration in the real world, taking the landscapes of Gippsland, Mount Buller and Japan as her subject. In doing so, she has pushed away from the enclosed, personal world of the subconscious, towards a much more universal experience. For as much as we have shared dreams and fantasies, the surrealist vision is a highly personalised one. In her most recent landscapes, Hammond has gravitated towards intentionally unspecific or generic settings. Her paintings, she stresses, “are not about the landscape” and she intentionally seeks scenes that are geographically unrecognisable. In Hammond’s paintings, the landscape is clouded with the hazy light of dusk or dawn, and seems to exist as little more than a prop for her experiments in light and texture. As such, they take on the uncanny possibility that they could be anywhere. Although impossible to pin down their precise location, each one has a striking sense of familiarity, as though it is a place that one has visited in the distant past.

Concurrent with this thematic development, Hammond has settled into a small format that perfectly suits her cause. Each work exists as an exquisitely sealed hermetic portal onto a distant, but disquietingly familiar world. Looking at her paintings of clouds, such as Flight JQ3 2009, it is impossible not to be reminded of the tiny cabin windows of commercial airliners, while in her Gippsland Twilight series, the format evokes the view from a speeding car window, or perhaps that of a blurry Polaroid snap-shot.

In these paintings, Hammond is asking how we frame the sublime. Not simply how we represent the majesty of nature, but also how we recall it, how we package it, and how we consume it. More pertinently, they question how we overlook this majesty in our everyday lives. In the safe, comfortable space of the aeroplane or automobile, how often do we fail to notice the sublime as we speed on by? Margaret Morse has termed this the ‘precondition of distraction.’ The car interior becomes a de-realised ‘non-space’ in which the traveller is insulated from the outside world, achieving what Morse calls a ‘mobile privatisation’ that displaces us from our surroundings. A similar sense of ‘distraction’ might be conjured by the image of the tourist, unable to quantify any experiences not captured through the prism of their camera.

This is the challenge set by Hammond’s paintings, prints and drawings. For they are not about replicating the sublime, or even using paint to imitate nature in order to create a virtual swoon. Rather, Hammond’s vision is driven by a much more profound romanticism. As her paintings have become less reliant upon fantasy, they have insistently drawn attention to the beauty inherent in the world around us. Rather than being portals to an imaginary world, they point to a world just outside our windows; rather than a mystery beyond reality, these works point to the mystery within reality. It is this sentiment that causes one’s heart to swoon before Hammond’s paintings. As Sasha Grishin notes, “In Hammond’s depiction of the sublime, we do not experience the quality of terror and awe, but a sense of glowing inner radiance.” This is not the classical sense of the sublime, for there is no fear in this world. The mystery of Hammond’s work comes from seeing the familiar anew; realising beauty where before there was only the ordinary; finding majesty in the mundane; grandeur in the generic; the sublime in our everyday lives. Hammond challenges us to be constantly aware of the wonder and beauty that surrounds us, and that through this mystery we might learn to swoon again.

Kirrily Hammond: Swoon runs from 22 September - 10 October 2009 at Chapman & Bailey Gallery, 350 Johnston Street, Abbotsford, Victoria

Great Expectations: A Personal Reflection on the music of Gareth Skinner

2009-08-05T18:33:00.000-07:00

I remember a warm summer morning in January 2009, sitting with Gareth Skinner on the balcony of Sydney hotel. We had been woken early by group of drunken teens frolicking in the hotel’s swimming pool. Nursing a mind-crushing hangover, I remember calling Skinner a cynic. Without a beat, he replied, ‘A cynic is what an optimist calls a realist.” Listening to Looking for Vertical, Skinner’s latest cello-driven opus, it might be easy to focus on the seemingly misanthropic cynicism of songs like “Your Pointless Life”, “Amateur Hour” or “There is No Light”. But this would be to miss the point. For Skinner isn’t a cynic, nor is he an optimist, or even a realist. Indeed, Looking for Vertical is far too thoughtful, complex and ultimately human body of work to fit neatly into such narrow categories.

At the epigraph of Confederacy of Dunces (one of Skinner’s favourite novels), John Kennedy Toole quotes Jonathan Swift: “When a true genius appears in the world, you may know him by this sign, that the dunces are all in confederacy against him.” Looking for Vertical is the restless work of an artist committed to the refutation of mediocrity. Like Ignatius J. Reilly, the anti-hero of Toole’s novel, Skinner’s work sits outside the mainstream: it is an indefinable blend of rock, pop, classical and art noise, driven with a baroque grandeur by Skinner’s inimitable cello playing. Unlike Reilly, however, there is a rigour and virtuosity to Skinner’s rejection of the mundane, ordinary and mediocre. A better comparison might be to the social criticism of artists like John Brack. For like Brack, Skinner’s work places expectations upon the listener and upon the very world around them. Their work presents a call to arms against stupidity, against the banal and against the vacuous. In doing so, they place expectations upon society – expectations that things could be better, smarter, more thoughtful and ultimately more human.

As a result, Looking for Vertical is an album filled with unexpected surprises. When he wishes, Skinner can conduct a world of sweetness and light, where sweeping cellos swoon in a feast of intertwining melodies [‘Intro’, ‘Interlude’, ‘Epitaph’]. At other points, Skinner’s cello takes on a tortured metallic squeal [There is No Light], or creates a freight-train rumble of driving rhythms [‘Looking for Vertical’]. In the world of Looking for Vertical, everything is in its right place, unless it fits better elsewhere, when it is inverted, distorted, ripped apart, twisted and torn beyond recognition. But this is not ‘quirkiness’ for its own sake, and Skinner’s work never devolves into self-indulgent zany-ness. Rather, Skinner’s experimentation appears as a natural extension of his restless and demanding ethos.

Virtuosic without recourse to flashiness, Looking for Vertical is brimming with the clear joy of playing – the pleasure taken in experimentation and in pushing his songs, arrangements and performace to their limits. The listening experience is, as a result, infectiously enjoyable. Songs like ‘Looking for Vertical’ and ‘More than What’ bounce joyfully along with a rhythmic insistency as primordial as any rock band, whilst driven by Skinner’s wild cello playing, which has no peer in Australia or abroad. No other string player can match both the artfulness of Skinner’s intensity, with his range and virtuosity. But it is perhaps, Skinner’s ability to transcend this virtuosity that makes Looking for Vertical such an exciting record to listen to. As Skinner sings in the song of the same name, “I don’t want your pointless life’. Looking for Vertical shows an artist who wants something much more – something exceptional. Fortunately, Skinner isn’t too cynical to think that it is something that we might all enjoy.

Looking for Vertical is available now 2009 through Rubber Records.

Ancestral Power and the Aesthetic

2009-06-12T00:12:00.001-07:00

Below is an extended version of a piece that was published in Crikey this week.

Ancestral Power and the Aesthetic
Ian Potter Museum of Art, University of Melbourne

Last Wednesday, amidst relatively little fanfare, the Ian Potter Museum at the University of Melbourne launched Ancestral Power and the Aesthetic: the first ever exhibition of barks paintings from the Donald Thomson Collection. Thomson was a pioneering anthropologist, who amassed over 4500 objects during his expeditions into Australia’s north in the 1930s and 1940s. At the opening of the exhibition, a former trustee of the National Gallery of Victoria was overheard to say that perhaps Ancestral Power should have been the NGV’s ‘Winter Masterpieces’ exhibition. Certainly, in my experience, I have never seen anything quite like the twenty bark paintings on display. Put simply, they are some of the finest examples of Australian Indigenous art in existence. The fact that they have never been exhibited before, and remain relatively unheralded and unknown is quite staggering.

If the works in Ancestral Power and the Aesthetic were not so momentous, so profoundly moving and so visually dynamic, it would be easy for them to be overshadowed by the story of their creation and collection. It is Thomson’s name that echoes through the exhibition, particularly as several of the major works are unattributed. Nor are Thomson’s achievements without cause for celebration. A maverick young anthropologist, he entered Arnhem Land at a bloody crossroads in the Territory’s history. The Caledon Bay Crisis had seen the local Yolngu people clash with Japanese poachers, in a series of violent episodes that escalated to include attacks upon the local constabulary. In Canberra, there were fears of an Indigenous uprising in the North, and Thomson’s mission was intended as much as conciliatory and anthropological.

Arriving in central Arnhem Land in 1935, Thomson immersed himself in Yolngu culture, quickly befriending the important elder and Yolngu statesman Wonggu. Wonggu would later paint two monumental barks for Thomson, which remain some of the jewels in the collection, and form the centrepoint of Ancestral Power.

Thomson’s association with men like Wonggu, enabled him to amass one of the finest collections of Indigenous treasures in the world. Amongst literally thousands of objects, he amassed a body of around 70 bark paintings, of whose quality is unsurpassed in any other collection. Following his death in 1970, Thomson’s widow Dorita bequeathed the collection to the University of Melbourne; a bequest that, according to Mrs Thomson, was considered by the University to be “a bit of a nuisance.” The collection eventually found a home at the Melbourne Museum, where it remains of permanent loan.

Ancestral Power and the Aesthetic brings together 20 masterpieces from the Thomson collection. They have been carefully selected by Melbourne Museum curator Lindy Allen to represent the differing regional, clan and aesthetic varieties within the collection. Allen’s passion has been one of the driving forces in the preservation, documentation and exhibition of the Thomson collection.

When Allen arrived at the Museum in 1989, the Thomson collection was sadly neglected, in poor storage and with limited documentation. It took nearly five years before every item in the collection was properly photographed and catalogued. Armed with a hefty folder of photographic reproductions, in 1994 Allen began the complicated process of community consultation and fieldwork. At first, her folders were met with caution – for the local Yolngu were unaware of what dangerous or powerful images their predecessors may have depicted. But over time, Allen built trust. Every evening, she would have a knock on the door, and be greeted by a different Yolngu family asking to borrow the folder. Eventually, she began to assemble information on each work, and more importantly, consent to exhibit these prized pieces.

According to Allen, “It has taken until now for us to have the confidence that every one of these works could be shown.” Whilst she laments certain pieces that could not be exhibited due to an inability to locate the relevant family member, it is this deep integrity and respect that has endeared Allen to the communities in which she works, in much the same way as Thomson before her. Although it is difficult to assess, one suspects that this mutual respect has given the Yolngu confidence in Allen’s intentions, and in turn allowed her certain levels of accommodation. The curator notes, “It is often not about what can or cannot be shown, but about what can be said about the objects. It is about negotiating the grounds for engagement.”

In a broad sense, engagement is at the core of Ancestral Power. By the 1930s, the Yolgnu elders were faced with the difficult realisation that their survival depended upon defending their culture against the encroaching tide of modernity. According to Allen, the elders “had an understanding that they must engage with the outside world. They were thinking about how to tell the outside world about who they were; that this was their country. The works became like deeds to their land.”

The paintings produced for Thomson by Wonggu and the other elders were created to show the complexity, value and relevance of Yolngu culture. This lends them an urgent intensity, but at the same time, the barks included in Ancestral Power are works of meticulous grace and refined elegance. Each bark has been fastidiously prepared; perfectly cured and flattened, so that after seventy years they have not curled nor cracked: faults that plague bark paintings that have been hastily prepared for the contemporary commercial market.

But perhaps the most remarkable aspect of these bark paintings is that they represent the very genesis of two-dimensional painting in Yolngu culture. For whilst the Yolngu had long painted their sacred clan designs (or minytji) on the body and ceremonial objects, the barks collected by Thomson were the first time when these designs had been removed from their ceremonial ‘use’ context and applied for a purely aesthetic purpose.

This transferral required a considerable aesthetic inventiveness, for although the Yolngu had a wealth of traditional designs, these required modification to the new media. New motifs were introduced, particularly those figurative devices necessary for the depiction of grand narratives. This is particularly evident in the monumental depiction of the Djan’kawu Sisters Story by Mawunpuy Mununggurr, which is one of the highlights of the exhibition and an indisputable masterpiece of Australian painting. In attempting to depict the Djan’kawu Sister in her half-ancestral, half-Yolngu form, Mawunpuy’s work shows the dawn of Yolngu figurative painting and the introduction of several important techniques – such as the use of footprints to indicate land travel, and the use of contrasting sections of cross hatching and block colours in his figures. These techniques continue to reverberate through the lively contemporary schools of Yolngu painting at Yirrkala, Milingimbi and Ramingining.

The forms, content and images that emerge in these works define the history of Yolngu painting. With the benefit of retrospect, these early masterpieces reveal an evolving history, whose sparkle illuminates not only the past, but also the present and the future. But beyond their art historical or anthropological significance, the works included in Ancestral Power and the Aesthetic are visually astounding. Allen’s entire body lights up when she speaks of the ‘shine’ or bir’yun of these barks. According to Allen, this ‘brilliance’ was “intended to capture the essence of the wangarr [ancestors] an harness its strength and power or marr.” These are paintings that speak of a distant time, in an ancient language; and yet, by their brilliance they seek to transcend time: to be simultaneously ancient and modern. It is perhaps this reason, that despite their age, these works bristle with an urgency and power that is as striking for its formal and conceptual relevance as for the ancient cosmology which it evokes.

Ancestral Power and the Aesthetic: Arnhem Land Painting and Objects from the Donald Thomson Collection
Ian Potter Museum of Art, University of Melbourne
2 June – 23 August 2009

Patrick Kunoth Pwerle

2009-03-09T17:28:00.000-07:00

Patrick Kunoth Pwerle was born in 1981 at Artekerre in the remote eastern desert region of Utopia. Since commencing his art practice in 2007, Kunoth Pwerle’s oeuvre has been singularly devoted to the subject of birds. A wild aviary has sprung from his artistic imagination. Whether eagle, owl, emu or hawk, each is created unique, coloured with its own eccentric disposition. But beyond revelling in natural variety, Patrick Kunoth Pwerle’s dedication to avian form reveals an intuitively modernist project of repetition and refinement in which the artist explores the reductive potential of both the sculptural medium and his favoured motif.

Kunoth Pwerle is not the first sculptor to become obsessed with the figure of the bird. Almost a century earlier, the image of the bird in flight launched Constantin Brâncuşi on a forty-year journey of artistic refinement. Brâncuşi saw his art practice as an evolutionary search for pure form, never abandoning the natural world, but reducing it to its most basic elements in order to lay bare the underlying nature of the image. Comparing the sculptures of Brâncuşi and Kunoth Pwerle, the attraction of the streamlined avian form becomes readily apparent. For both artists, it is a form that is easily suggested using only a small number of oblique visual cues (the curve of the body for instance, or the point of the beak).

Over his short career, Kunoth Pwerle has developed a skilful sculptural shorthand for depicting birds, which often relies on no more than a few brief incisions to indicate wings, tails or beaks. Unlike Brâncuşi, who saw the reductive process as a means of capturing the essence of the image, in Kunoth Pwerle’s work this process is used in deference to the unaltered natural medium. Carved from the soft wood of the bean tree (erythrina vespertilio), it is the medium (rather than the image) that dictates form, allowing the natural object to express itself in a totemic intensity. Not only does this enable Kunoth Pwerle to exploit a boundless, naturally occurring variety of forms; more importantly, it offers a distinctly Indigenous metaphor for the connectedness of all things. The figure and the form are united, not in opposition, but in a holistic union, with obvious parallels to the poetic mythos of the Dreaming. The birds are literally returned to the branches as the figure returns to the form; the object to the subject; the aesthetic to the natural order; and so on. Kunoth Pwerle’s project takes on an evolutionary aesthetic logic that provides a striking metaphor for the intersection of modern art and Indigenous cosmology; something that we might begin to see as a uniquely Indigenous modernism.

Patrick Kunoth Pwerle began making art in 2007 under the influence and encouragement of his parents Dinni Kunoth Kemarre and Josie Kunoth Petyarre. Since 2005, Josie and Dinni have spearheaded a revival in the Utopian sculptural tradition that first emerged in the late 1980s under the stewardship of art co-ordinator Rodney Gooch. Since 2007, Dinni and Josie have risen to prominence as consummate observers and compulsive chroniclers. In their art, the minutiae of everyday life becomes a worthy subject for artistic exaltation, demonstrating an artistic vision unencumbered by restrictive binary notions of ‘traditional’ and ‘contemporary.’ Art has always been a part of the Indigenous cultural backdrop, connecting Indigenous people to the world around them and the immutable Dreaming. The art of Dinni and Josie showed just how adaptive this cosmology could be.

Kunoth Pwerle’s earliest works show a clear debt to his parents’ observational style. And yet, as Kunoth Pwerle gained confidence as an artist, he quickly abandoned their astute attention to detail in favour of a plastic freedom. As his parents’ work became more detailed and naturalistic, Kunoth Pwerle’s sculptures became more abstract, dispensing with all unnecessary representational elements.

Compounding this move towards a sculptural abstraction, Kunoth Pwerle’s works have more recently developed a painterly dimension that further distances any suggestion of naturalism. Drawing upon the broad gestural brushstrokes and overlapping dot-work that has characterised Utopian painting, Kunoth Pwerle’s use of paint often seems less about defining the form, than highlighting its very objecthood. At times, Kunoth Pwerle’s paintwork seems to allude to the ceremonial body painting tradition, further highlighting the totemic nature of the object. At other times it seems to almost camouflage the form, as though the sculptural object was no more than a sounding board for a painterly experiment. And yet, whilst Kunoth Pwerle’s sculptures push referentiality to its very limits, they maintain a confidence in their connectedness to the landscape, defiantly foregrounding the link between his modernist project and his Anmatyerre homelands.

Patrick Kunoth Pwerle was born at the dawn of the Utopia art movement. If artwork has been one of the principle fields upon which Indigenous Australians have engaged with the wider world – through which they have bridged the tribal and the modern and showed their traditions to be both contemporary and relevant – then Patrick Kunoth Pwerle has grown up at the frontier of this exquisite intersection of Indigenous cosmology and modernity. His work offers us a way to look beyond these rigid binary positions and see the very possibilities of a Utopian modernism.

The body of a lover stretched out like the hills of Adelaide.

2008-12-01T16:10:00.000-08:00

The body of a lover stretched out like the hills of Adelaide.

Your body looms above me like a hill
A landscape dignified, rolling white
That stings sweetly like frost
And fumes with the ghostly pollen of your breath

These sordid souls sing hymns of praise
While monkey-men claim cheap outrage
To ring out for Eldorado
Quick quick this lust for material gain

A frightful spectre to myself unknown
Unrecognisable, a dried and blackened shell
That shuffles through the city streets
All its cavities smoothed over by gentility

No public flame, nor private dares to shine
To grope his way finding stars unlit
Bestows one final patronising kiss
Upon this concrete democratic night
Drinking deep draughts of the most simple medicine of your arms

In your pastures we observed all things as though for the first time
Number to number, in no mode or order
Half-formed thoughts disappear into fog
The silence of the flood as intimate as love
Amongst the flames of burning livestock
And palls of smoke above the roof tops

The sky a blood red mass
Birds squawked, dogs howled
Sly-grog, lynch-mobs, unholy hunger and schemes of villainy
In the burning afternoon
We walked on leaves and silence
Volcanic silence of solitary travel
Where the past would make no demands upon the present.
Ask the flames she cried
For they will never hear the silent scratch of pens
That writes away man’s being
Like unset jewels in the shallows of clear water
Or the stench of men who have over-exerted themselves.

Fat lands set in a hot monotonous endless time
White bodies naked on the low damp ground
His sleepy mouth now at last free of bile
In the wilderness turned winter in his head
The seed of love was sick and shouted grievously
Crossed my brow against dreams to come
Put down my phone, wallet, keys
And gave myself to the fire and grass.

Recording Diary

2007-09-12T22:14:00.001-07:00

What a week! I am so drained and excited and nervous... Over five days we managed to record and mix eight new tracks with producer Dave McCluney at Atlantis Studios in Port Melbourne. Listening to the end results there are a few things that we are going to have to tidy up, but by and large I am fairly happy with the end results...

Anyway, before I forget here are my recollections of a very wonderful and creative five days...

SATURDAY 8 SEPTEMBER

On Friday, my nerves had started to get the better of me and I spent a fairly restless night before getting up very early on Saturday and making my way from Fitzroy to Port Melbourne. I arrived at Atlantis around 930, giving me half-an-hour to settle in before the rest of the band (Dan Hoey/Victor Utting and Fancy Dave Bower) arrived. By about 12 we were ready to start doing takes. Dave McCluney set Dan and I up in the main room of the studio, with Dan playing their 1853 Blunther concert grand piano. I was playing Linday's Gibson mini-jumbo acoustic guitar. Dave and his kit were set up in the middle isolation booth, with Vic's guitar amp in the other. Vic set up playing his Fender Telecaster through an Ampeg combo that belongs to Greg Arnold (Things of Stone and Wood). Although small in appearance, the tone of this amp was absolutely terrific. Later in the sessions I used it to overdub my guitar parts to 'You Can't Stand in the Way of Progress'. It seemed the perfect amp for my Rickenbacker 330.

The session started slowly with us trying to piano/guitar/drums recorded for 'Ode to the Women who Would be my Wife'. In hindsight it was a bad song to start with - very fast and energetic - we couldn't quite get a good balance of energy and precision at that time of the morning. Eventually we abandoned the track to try something else.

At this point we moved onto Smile - one of the slower songs on the record. Much to our surprise, we managed to produce a really great version in only two or three takes. Having settled in a bit we then proceeded to sail through a brand new song. We hadn't yet worked out a title for the song, so we were using the working title of 'September Song' - but during the mix, Fancy suggested 'This One's Made For You' - a line that alludes to the Swan Gold commercial that many West Australian's will remember as a prominent feature of 1980s television. We did two really great takes of this new song - which we eventually edited together.

I can't remember which song we did next - it was either 'Paddy, There's Got to be One More Bar Open' or 'Ghost Town'. Either way, by this stage we had really settled in and got through both songs fairly quickly. For 'Ghost Town', Dan played the 1973 Rhodes at Atlantis, which sounded very lovely.

By the time we had finished Paddy and Ghost Town it was about 4:30pm and Fancy had to head off to a gig with his band Dust at the Empress of India in Fitzroy North. This gave Vic, Dan and I a chance to run through a song without drums. Playing to a click track we recorded a very slow version of 'A Million Ways to Say'. Whenever we played this song live, we always sped up a lot in the first chorus. Dave McCluney was determined that the song kept the same slow stately pace throughout - hence his insistence that we play to a click track. This was pretty tricky at first - partly because playing to a click takes a lot of concentration, and partly because we had never played the song that slowly before. After three or four takes we finally got the hang of it - when we listened back we were really amazed. Dave was absolutely right about the speed - by keeping it slow, the chorus take on a really stately dignity that really brings out the melody.

After 'A Million Ways' we must have had a bit of a break and started thinking about overdubs. I don't know what I recorded, but I must have done some vocals. It is quite possible that I did the vocals for 'A Million Ways' because Dave was pretty excited about that one. I think I also did the vocals to Smile. We ended the day with me recording a guitar/vocal version of the old Clancy Brother's tune 'A Parting Glass'. It was an exhausting day, and Vic and Dan and I headed to the Marquis of Lorne for dinner and to take stock. Exhausted, we knew we had done some good work, but that we had a lot more to do.

SUNDAY 9 SEPTEMBER

Again, I woke early. So I headed to the bakery on Smith Street and bought some rolls for lunch. Having planned to record 8 tracks, we only had one song left - 'You Can't Stand in the Way of Progress'. That said, 'Progress' was the song that we were considering to be the lead track, so we really wanted a perfect take of it.

We had left it till last because it was the only song on which Fancy played his drums with sticks (as opposed to brushes). Having got the sound ready, we slowly settled in to a good groove and got a pretty great take of the song. Again, Dan was playing the Rhodes. Listening to the final take, I must have been pretty happy with it because I can hear my voice saying - 'That take was great' and Fancy agrees.

After a short break we turned our attention to 'Ode for the Women' which we had abandoned on the first day. When we listed back to the last take we were really surprised. What we had dismissed as being too sloppy was in fact, wildly chaotic and energetic. Listening with fresh ears, Dave McCluney pointed out that whilst we might hope to get a more precise take, it was highly unlikely we'd get anything with that level of raucous energy. Personally, I thought it was the best thing we had done. I think Dan was a little doubtful... particularly as he had to overdub a piano solo over the rather shambollic middle-8. Still, consensus was that it stayed and we moved on to overdubs.

Buoyed with the excitement of discovering the energy of 'Ode' I think I started by laying a vocal down for that track. I'm pretty certain that I did it only one take - again, I think I was just riding on the energy of the song - my phrasing is very different to how I have traditionally sung the song, but it has a looseness and wildness that nicely matches the band's playing.

Next I think we got Fancy to put some very simple drums over 'A Million Ways to Say' - Dave McCluney had this vision of using a big booming floor tom - which Dave recorded first. Again, I think Dan was dubious - not really taking to the floor tom idea. Eventually, I think we got Fancy to layer over some cymbals, hi-hats and kick drum. The drums settled in underneath the rest of the band, just giving it a bit more thrust in the instrumental sections, which I think worked well.

After that I did a few more vocal takes – from memory I must have done ‘September’, ‘Paddy’ and ‘Ghost Town’ because then I had the idea of getting all four of us into the room sing some rowdy choruses to those two songs. With the four of us crowded around a mic yelling like a bunch of drunks at the football it was possibly the most fun and silly things I could ever imagine recording. Dave McCluney dubbed us ‘the yobs’ – a fitting epithet as we certainly sound like the Man U choir. That said, when we listened back, the idea worked, providing a boisterous and somewhat rabble-like chorus. We repeated the technique on ‘Ode’. We ended the day with Dan recording some piano solos to ‘Ode’ and possibly ‘Progress’ – I think I had pretty much lost concentration by this point and was leaving the creative biz to Dan, Vic, Fancy and Dave McCluney. It is quite possible that I was sitting outside enjoying the sunshine. It is also highly possible that I was being a bit annoying as Dan and Dave made the suggestion that I could “if I wanted to” sleep in on Monday morning while Dan did more keyboard overdubs. I think the session finished when Dan decided he had had enough playing. I went home, ate curry and watched rubbish on the television.

MONDAY 10 SEPTEMBER

I am usually very good at sleeping in. That said, I’m not usually very good at doing what I’m told. So, I woke up early, had breakfast at Cavallero on Smith Street, drove to Port Melbourne and bought some rolls for lunch and then headed to the studio. After all that, I still managed to get there by 10:30am. Oh well… Dan had just finished another solo – to ‘A Million Ways’ I think. I’m a bit hazy, but I think he also did some organ overdubs. Vic also did a tambourine overdub on ‘A Million Ways’.

At 11:30 Emma Frichot arrived – so we turned our attentions to doing vocal overdubs. As Dan had been doing ‘A Million Ways’, I think we got Emma to start on that one… Emma’s vocals immediately lifted the songs, giving the choruses a real extra boost. Emma was a real trooper – getting through the songs quickly and professionally. In about an hour, Emma had done brilliant vocal takes on ‘Progress’, ‘Ghost Town’, ‘Smile’, ‘Ode’ and ‘A Million Ways’. Around 12:30, Fancy arrived to do some male backing vocals for ‘September’. Again, the three of us crowded round the mic to sing harmony. Then Dave McCluney got us to all do our parts separately. He was trying to achieve a big chorus effect, which he was able to realise quite brilliantly I think. A very amusing moment occurred at the very end of these backing vocal takes, when Fancy decided to sing his part Idol style (and sadly I don’t mean Billy Idol).

By this stage, Dan and Vic had decided that their presence wasn’t really necessary, so they took the afternoon off. This left me in the studio on my own, so I took the opportunity to finish off the rest of the vocals. Working with Dave McCluney was really great because he was really insistent in not doing things over and over again. He was much more concerned to get great emotion and energy than to get things note perfect. On several occasions I wanted to redo something because I thought I was a bit off-tune or out of time, and Dave would casually reply, with something like “Nah, that was the best bit.” Listening back, he was almost always right.

As the session was pretty much finished, I decided that I wanted to record at least one electric guitar part – partly because I wanted to hear how my Ric sounded through Greg Arnold’s guitar amp and partly because I never get the opportunity to play electric guitar anymore. So I cranked the amp right up and used both pick-ups on the Ric to achieve this scorching but warm tone. I laid down some incidental noise and arpeggios on ‘Progress.’ The tinkling guitar notes at the beginning of ‘Progress’ were achieved by picking the strings at the tail of the bridge of the guitar.

TUESDAY 11 SEPTEMBER

We knew Tuesday was going to be a bit mad, as it was the last day that we had to record and the last day that Dan or Vic could be in the studio. The first part of the morning was taken up with Dan doing organ overdubs. He also added a terrific piano part on ‘Ghost Town’. At around 12:30, Garrett Costigan arrived to do some pedal steel parts. Garrett is one of the most amazing pedal steel players I have ever heard – you might know his work from Tex, Don and Charlie’s first album. Anyway, we were all pretty nervous when Garrett arrived. He started out with Smile – and within seconds had broken our hearts with his pining playing. Noodling through a couple of takes, his playing just completed the song perfectly. He then laid parts over ‘September’ and ‘Ode’. It was around this point that things started to sound complete. The afternoon was a bit of a rush – Dan was leaving for Darwin in the evening, so he had to rush to get the last of his parts complete. By 6:30 we had done all the recording that we were able to do.

We left Dave McCluney to start editing and mixing. I dropped Vic home, picked up Dan and drove him to the airport. Dan had looked so stressed all through the sessions, but he had done an amazing job. This record is a very keyboard heavy one, and Dan really took control of a lot of the rehearsals and sessions. I think a lot of the recordings are very much testament to the sensitivity and delicacy of his playing. In the car I asked Dan if he was excited about his holiday in the Northern Territory. He replied, “Yeah, but I’m more excited about the recording”. I was really glad to hear Dan say that – he had looked so stressed and nervous during the process. During mixing, listening to one of Dan’s takes, Dave McCluney noted, ‘You’re really lucky to have someone like Dan – he takes so much care with everything he plays.” Too true.

WEDNESDAY 12 SEPTEMBER

Dave McCluney has spent a few hours working on Tuesday night to start the mixing, so that when I arrived at 10am on Wednesday, he had pretty much finished the first song. It was the epic ‘September’ – which he has spent several hours getting to a polished final state. It was really nice to be able to walk right in and hear something completely done. We made a couple of minor adjustments and it was done.

Then we moved on to ‘A Million Ways’ – we did a little bit of editing to this song, shortening the ending and fiddling around with a few bits (particularly the harmonica solo, which I was less keen on than Dave was). It took a little longer than we thought, but we were still roughly on track. Fancy arrived around 12:30 and we did the mixing for Smile, before Fancy had to leave to attend to some matters regarding the financing of his new home.

Dave McCluney and I turned our attention to mixing ‘Progress’. We knew this was going to be one of the more difficult ones. We had wanted a fade-in, and had played an extended introduction. Putting it all together was something of marathon, but finally I think it all came together. It wasn’t quite the long epic introduction that we had planned, but I think that it works much better and is much more coherent. Dan’s organ line (a last minute thought of his) really pulls it all together. We did a mix, and then I suggested to Dave that we put a really big slap-back reverb on the vocals in the chorus. All up, I was really happy with how this song came out – although I think it is a song that is yet to find its voice.

After ‘Progress’ we mixed ‘Ghost Town’ – one of the simpler songs to mix, and we did it quite quickly. At this stage we were running out of time. Another band were coming in around 7pm, and we had been mixing all day. We rushed through “Ode” and “Parting Glass”, with Vic arriving just as we finished. Dave burnt us off a CD and we drove home listening to it…

Five Easy Pieces

2007-09-06T23:20:00.000-07:00

It's only one sleep till we head into the studio to start cutting our new record. Tentatively titled 'Five Easy Pieces for Piano and Guitar', we're hoping to have it all finished in a couple of weeks for a late January release.

I can't believe how nervous I've been all week. All my thoughts are concentrated on this recording. It is that incredible mix of nerves and excitement which makes you go over things in your mind a million times, like which guitar should I use on which song ... or should I take a towel to the studio in case I want to wash my face ... or who is going to make lunch while we're in the studio. These are all such silly thoughts, but I wonder if this is how famous bands felt before their first few recordings.

Anyway, the most daunting thing I had to do was finish the words to one of the songs we are going to record. It is the song I talked about a couple of posts ago (My Life Flashing Before My Eyes). Musically, this was probably the quickest song I've ever written and Dan and I have been tinkering with the music for several weeks. But other than the first two lines that I mentioned, I've been really stuck with the words. For the last few days I've been sweating over them, and I've at least got some words for each part. I'm not that happy with them (some are way too corny), but I thought that I could post them here and then if anyone had any better ideas for parts they could suggest them... It could be a communal act of nostalgia. So here goes nothin':

September Song

I remember when you passed unto the Lord
I was working ten till four at the video store
You whose generous fruits were savaged with pain
I know on that day you marched with the saints

So I drove to your side at 109
It was as fast as my car would go without leaving the road
Listening all the way to community radio
While two fools went on and on
I just wished they'd play another song

I got there just in time to see my Aunt all bleary eyed
And my brothers and sisters as they started to arrive
As we measured your life in Swan Gold and the shedding of tears
Because all words hung frail in the fluorescent hospital air

So we talked of how you walked so slowly round the shops
Of how you used to use a shopping trolley for a crutch
As your poem left the earth on the flickering bow
Of a silent spring wind whispering 'where to now?'

But I don't know who we are anymore
Who we are anymore

Your last years were a labour but you wore them like a martyr
Till one day your knees finally gave out asunder
'Neath all of the weight that your old Scottish shoulders could bear
As you gathered your flock 'round the buffet of your life
Of every joy you had saved, every cent set aside
For a time when we needed it most, well we needed you now

But I don't know who we are anymore
Who we are anymore

------------------------------

So please be savage and give me any suggestions that you have...

Justifications

2007-09-03T20:45:00.000-07:00

Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear.

Who would have thought that this blog thing was going to be so difficult. Anyway, I have been so busy of late that I haven't had much time to write anything on my blog. I started this blog on a whim, and now it is causing me immense amounts of guilt at my general laziness and inability to produce anything...

But, I haven't been that lazy... I've been very busy. Moreover, I have several good topics which I will post in the following month or so. But, I figured I could let everyone know why I have been busy.

Firstly, this week I turned 28. Although none the wiser, I have grown a beard, which I hope lends some gravitas. Anyway, this week my band (The Holy Sea) is heading into the studio to record the follow-up to our critically acclaimed (read: commercial failure) 2000 ep Blessed Unrest. Anyway, the new record is going to be called '5 Easy Pieces for Piano and Guitar' and is being recorded from Sat-Wed at Atlantis Studios, under the watchful eye of Mr David McCluney.

Anyway, the four of us (Dan Hoey/Victor Utting/F. David Bower and myself) have been busily rehearsing and whatnot and are very excited about committing some of our songs to tape. Expect to see it on shelves around January. Edward J. Grug III is doing the artwork, and their should be a video clip to accompany the release.

Anyway, that's my big news for the moment... In the next few weeks I'm going to add some more intellectual posts.

A Response to Mr O. Boot

2007-08-20T17:56:00.000-07:00

It was with a wonderful pang of pleasure that I received my first critical response on this blog. (I mean critical in the discursive sense). It gave me a chance to revisit my earlier musings. The comments below are my first response, but hopefully they will spark further debate, because reading through these (and my first post), I realise that I have not yet fully elucidated my theories on exile and Antipodality. That said, hopefully these comments will spark further discussion.

So, first, here are Mr Boot's comments...

Three things:
(i) It's not no-man's language heading into no-man's land - it has your name on it. You might write something here, that you wish you hadn't but someone, somewhere will find it stashed in a cache of memory and remind you that you once said it. Sort of like Rudd and the strippers, but more like the Liberal guy who lost preselection because he called Lynne Kosky a ho, or somethign like that. That is why it is better to be anon on the web.
(ii) You're not an exile, you're a migrant. Just like the Greeks, Italians, Vietnamese, Sudanese etc etc coming to Melbourne to seek a better like. It's good here. If you really want to assimilate you should go for Essendon or Collingood.
(iii) Welcome to the 21st century.

And here are my somewhat rushed, immediate responses.

Dear Mr Boot,

Thank you for your thoughtful comments. They certainly require thoughful responses, to which at this point I can only offer my immediate gut resposes.

My first response would be to challenge the blunt literalness with which you have taken my metaphorical musings. My major criticism of your response to this post would be your failure to recognise that, beyond dictionary definitions, states such as 'exile' or even 'anonymity' can be purely psychological states of personal identity creation. In fact, a good argument could (and has) been made that the state of exile is often a very personal decision on behalf of the exile. (See for instance, Adorno). This decision is very different to that of the migrant or even of the refugee. This is a much larger semantic argument, which I will take up further below.

So, for the sake of clarity, let me return to the original post and add some definitory clarifications in response to your three criticisms...

(i). The reference to 'no-man's' language in no-man's land' was a pointed one - it was not solely intended as a reference to the internet, nor to Victoria, to anonymity, nor even to the nature of Antipodality, but rather an amalgam of all of these and perhaps even more. You criticise the nature of my anonymity, and yet, even through the veil of your non de plume I have a fairly good idea of who you are...

But, of course, this is beyond the issue - the point is that we are all, to some extent anonymous. I for one, could stand in the middle of Times Square or Piccidilly Circus with an enormous banner saying 'Henry F Skerritt' and would be as anonymous as the man next to me. Anonymity is a state of recognition - and as the Kevin Rudd story proves - one only ceases to be anonymous when everybody knows who you are. His trip to the strip club took little importance until he became a figure of note. In fact, your comments make the amusing double take of refusing to recognise the 'Liberal guy', over Lynne Kosky - thus returning him to the anonymity of the blogosphere (such an unattractive word). As something to hide behind, anonymity is a con. Rather, I think any written word should be chosen carefully, with the view that it will be read. Why else go to the narcissistic exercise of a diary or a blog? Also, anonymity can be very restrictive. I really enjoyed writing the post on Col Jordan and my grandfather, which I could not have done and remained anonymous. And, yet paradoxically, such a post is really quite meaningless to anyone who does not know me. No, I think the nature of anonymity is much broader than what name you choose to put on a piece of writing.

So, why did I choose the term exile. Certainly I do not see myself as a refugee, nor indeed a migrant. Both these terms come with a certain level of cultural baggage that I was hoping not to invoke. No, exile is the right term. Like Phillip and the 300 officials who travelled with him on the First Fleet, I left Perth for many reasons. Some were about adventure and the possibility of better things, others were about running away - about leaving those things that cramped us in. The utopian vision of the Antipodes as a place of abundant space and wealth (as spoken of by Cook and Banks), was tempered by the much older view of terra australis as 'Hic Sunt Dracones' or 'Here Be Dragons'. Part of the reason that it took over 130 years from the European discovery of Australia to the eventual settling of a colony was that since the arrival of Dutch and Portuguese sailors, Australia had tended to be considered as a barren, inhospitable land inhabited by violent savages. These two competing visions of the new country bore heavily on the minds of the officers of the First Fleet, and in many instances were given as the cause of insanity that living in the new country produced.

The nature of exile takes in both these competing positions. When Adorno discusses the European exiles living in New York, the distinction becomes very apparent. For although these emigres fled persecution in Europe during WWII, many lived their entire lives out in America. Despite this, they largely refused to learn the language or make much effort to assimilate. These exiles couldn't return to Europe after the War, because the Europe that they left had disappeared, but more importantly, they needed to hold on to the great concept of Europe that they remembered. Their whole self-defintion relied on a Europe that no longer existed and for them to give this up - to relinquish the position of exile - was for them to lose the great history that defined them as part of a great European cultural tradition.

You can be in exile for many reasons, but perhaps the simplest defintion could be that you cannot return, but you cannot let go. I think that perfectly describes the condition that I spoke of, and more pertinently describes the condition of Antipodality that Australia desperately needs to shed itself of.

That and Collingwood suck.

My Life Flashing Before My Eyes.

2007-08-13T23:37:00.000-07:00

We are just about to open a retrospective from the Sydney based hard-edge painter Col Jordan. I studied Col's work when I was doing my masters, so this exhibition is really important to me - it is such a thrill to handle works that you know so well from reproductions. Anyway, I was in the gallery hanging the show till quite late last night and then I got into work this morning at about 7am, so I am feeling a bit frazzled and generally a little nuts. For this reason, I doubt this post will be particularly cogent.

In any case, coming in this morning I had my first chance to properly survey Col's exhibition. It contains works done over 40 years - from 1966 to 2007. As I entered the gallery I had this strange thought about what entering a show like this must be like for the artist. After all, a retrospective like this aims to sum up an entire career's worth of production - it must be a bit like seeing your life flash before your eyes. I asked Col about this when he came in this morning. I think he was a bit hot and flustered after walking from his hotel to the gallery and thought that the question was a bit strange. That said, when he walked into the gallery and saw all of his works beaming forth, I think he was genuinely taken aback - I actually think the analogy of his 'life flashing before his eyes' seemed quite appropriate. Once he had caught his breath and thought about my question, Col replied "I just hope it looks this good when I see my life flashing before my eyes!" I thought that was a really great response, and I really hope that one day I can look back on something like that a say the same thing...

I am currently writing a song about my late grandfather. I don't know why this happened, but like most songs it just happened. Usually a couple of ideas come into my head and I then have to try and find something to tie them all together. In this case, the first line that came to me was"

We talked about how
you walked so slowly round the shops
using a shopping trolley as a crutch.

The second line that came to me was

Your last years were a labour
but you wore them like a matyr
till one day your knees finally gave out asunder
'neath all of the burdens your old Scottish shoulders could bare.

My grandfather, Jim Doherty was a really great old man. The thing I remember most about him was how he held the whole family together. Whenever something bad happened to one of the family, I remember my mother always being terrified about how much it would upset granddad. I don't recall him getting angry very often, but I do remember sometimes he looked upset about things that happened. He would be quite silent and you could see him carrying weight. Maybe this was why he was such a great patriach to the family. For most of the time I knew him (1979-2000), Granddad's arthritis was giving him trouble. His knees caused him so much pain that in the last days he could hardly walk. For such an active and social man, this was like being a prisoner in his own body. Up until he died, Granddad would relish any opportunity to get out of the house. In his later years, when mobility became a major issue this was largely restricted to visiting the shops twice a week. The trips to the Karrinyup shops followed a carefully plotted routine, where he slowly ambled around the centre pushing a trolley. Granddad always resisted a walking frame - preferring his old walking stick which my brother bought him in Scotland. But the stick wasn't much use towards the end, so the trolley became a substitute walking frame, which he mastered to quite good effect.

The other thing I remember about my grandfather was that he loved taking the family to Miss Mauds buffet on Murray Street. I don't know why he was so attached to Miss Maud's. My Dad always thought it was a reaction to the extreme poverty of Granddad's upbringing. According to this theory, having grown up hungry so often, the idea of being able to give someone 'all they could eat' took on a major significance. I don't know if this is true - it might be. Or maybe Granddad just really liked Miss Maud's. It doesn't really matter - but I haven't been there since he died. Anyway, the thing about Miss Maud's that sticks in my mind was how much my Grandfather remained dedicated to Miss Mauds, even though he was not able to get up and got to the buffet. He would be reliant on other members of the family to tell him what was at the buffet and to get his helpings, but that didn't worry him. As long as everyone else had their fill.

In writing this song about Granddad, I don't know why his physical ailments seem to be the continuing theme, but I think the reason is that even though his body was giving up on him, even though he was becoming more and more dependent on others, even though he couldn't help everyone in all the ways that I know he wanted to; somehow he still managed to hold us all together. Somehow, in the time when he was at his weakest and most vunerable, when we were all so terrified about what the future would hold, about how his condition would deteriorate and how unbearable it was to watch his and my Nannan's final days; even in those final months he held us all together and kept us a family. In the years that have passed a lot of things have changed. When she is really worried my mother still talks about wishing she could call up Nannan and Granddad. For me, I think that when Nannan and Granddad were alive it wasn't just about them or the advice that they would give, but about the stability and solidity that they provided our world. Amongst the family we would fight and people would hold grudges and grievances, but everyone would still turn up to Miss Maud's for Granddad's birthday. Just the idea of upsetting Granddad - of breaking his heart - was a symbol enough to keep us together. I think that is what I miss most about Granddad.

How Rad is CSIRAC?

2007-08-10T00:05:00.001-07:00

The anwer is extremely rad...

Also completely rad are the following CSIRAC links:

CISRAC at Unimelb

CSIRAC at Melbourne Museum

The Machine That Rocked Our World

Number One Blog - Exile on Gore Street

2007-08-09T21:07:00.000-07:00

Ok, so here goes... This is my blog. Something I have long resisted, but now have decided to embark up. To those wondering (and as I am the only person who, at this stage, is aware of this blog, this is clearly only for my own benefit) the title comes from a line from Ern Malley's poem "The Black Swan of Trespass". The Line in question goes:

"It is something to be at last speaking
Though in this No-Man's-language appropriate
Only to No-Man's-Land"

Why this quote? Well, it seems to me that the web is a big place. Recent statistics show that every day 2 squillion new blogs appear and because most blogs are immortal, eventually NASA scientists estimate that we are going to have to colonise at least another four major planetary systems just to have enough hard-drives to sustain these blogs. (Estimates calculated using CSIRAC: see above image - for those of you who don't know - CSIRAC is completely rad.) Anyway, as this blog is, for now at least, a space for my private rantings, it is a space where I can speak with the freedom of a 'no-man's-language', knowing that it will be heading into 'no-man's-land'.

That said, on another level, it begs the question; how much of everything that I say and do belongs to no-man's-land. Saying this, I don't just mean this virtual no-man's-land of the internet. Nor am I suggesting an existential dilemma to my purpose on the planet. Rather, I suppose I am pondering on a very specific question which relates mostly to myself and those friends of mine who have chosen to relocate from the seaside idyll of Perth, Western Australia to the burgeoning metropolis of Melbourne, Victoria.

And what shall I say about us? Firstly, there is a lot of us. Secondly, we all seem to congergate - largely in the Northern suburbs. We all seem like pretty motivated, intelligent sorts, so what has motivated our move? Were we running away from something? Were we just too gutless to move overseas, but too ambitious to stay in Perth? Or did we just want a seachange? I don't know - and I ask myself these questions often, along with other questions, like why are almost all of my friends here from Perth? Will we still be her in five/ten/fifty years time? Who knows...

What I do know is that, however long I stay here, I don't seem to ever shake saying 'I'm from Perth'. I don't say 'I grew up in Perth', I say 'I'm from Perth'. Like many of my friends, I talk about going 'back' or even 'home' for Christmas - but every time I go back to Perth it seems more alien to me. In some instances this is because things have changed, but mostly it is just because it really isn't my home anymore. From the day I got to Melbourne, I felt comfortable here, and I feel the city has changed me. But why then does this city never quite feel like home? Why do I still feel like an exile on Gore Street.

Part of the answer, I guess, is that we are still a community of expatriots. I was contemplating using a different word to expatriate - as WA is not a seperate country, although moreoften than not it feels like another world - but the more I thought about it, the more the word fit. We are an expatriate group - huddled together in the inner city suburbs, finding it hard to assimilate into the broader society. And why shouldn't we be... Personally, I think the Perth gang is great. I've met so many amazing people from Perth - I am just very disappointed that I had to travel to Melbourne to meet them.

I don't have answers to any of those questions... I just have more questions, and a whole bunch of meaningless speculations. For centuries, philosophers and scientists had speculated on the existence of a great southern land - terra australis. Ironically, one person who never believed in its existence was Lt. James Cook. Even upon sighting the east coast of Australia and landing at Botany Bay he remained unconvinced...

And maybe Cook was right. Maybe Australia doesn't exist. Maybe it is just a concept in our collective colonial imaginations. Not a place, so much as a conceptual formulation - something to balance out the idea of Europe - an Antipodes where eveything is upside down and nothing is as it seems. And then, maybe, just maybe it is not us expatriates from New Holland that are exiles in this country - maybe everyone else that lives here is also living in exile. This is not purely because we don't belong here, but because the notion of Australia actively rejects our ability to belong here. For this is the antipodes - the counterbalance and opposite of Europe - where Europe is small and full, here is big and empty, where Europe is civilised and cultivated, here is wild and ragged, Europe is up, here is down, Europe is home, here is abroad.

But I've never been to Europe. Like the rest of us, I'm just floating out to sea. Anyway, at least I'm living in Melbourne. I might be in exile here, but I've already learnt to hate Sydney ... which reminds me of a line from the old convict song 'Jim Jones':

And our ship was high upon the sea
Then pirates came along,
But the soldiers on our convict ship
Were full five hundred strong.
For they opened fire and somehow drove
That pirate ship away.
But I'd rather have joined that pirate ship
Than gone to Botany Bay.
With the storms ragin' round us,
And the winds a-blowin' gale,
I'd rather have drowned in misery
Than gone to New South Wales.