Tag Archives: western desert

September 19, 2012 · 1:23 pm

Bob Gibson Tjungurrayi

The following essay was written to accompany Bob Gibson Tjungurrayi: The First Solo Exhibition held at Mossenson Galleries, Perth, November 10 till December 5, 2009. The exhibition was presented in conjunction with Tjarlirli Art (Tjukurla, Western Australia).

Bob Gibson Tjungurrayi, Walatu, 2009, acrylic on canvas.

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.

Bob Gibson Tjungurrayi, Walatu, 2009, acrylic on canvas.

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.

Bob Gibson Tjungurrayi, Walatu, 2009, acrylic on canvas.

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.

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September 15, 2012 · 9:33 pm

Two Way Traffic: Yiwarra Kuju: The Canning Stock Route

The following review was first published in Art Guide Australia, January/February 2011, pp.45-48. Yiwarra Kuju: The Canning Stock Route was held at the National Museum of Australia (Canberra) from 30 July 2010 till 26 January 2011.

Jan Billycan, Kiriwirri 2008 acrylic on linen, 79.5 x 59.5 cm

Yiwarra Kuju: The Canning Stock Route, currently on display at the National Museum of Australia is a remarkable exhibition. It arose from a relatively simple premise to explore the Indigenous histories underpinning the lands traversed by the Canning Stock Route. It evolved into a groundbreaking partnership between FORM, the National Museum and nine remote Indigenous art centres, amassing an incredible repository of hundreds of paintings, tens of thousands of photographs and dozens of hours of video footage.

Like everything about the project, Yiwarra Kuju is the result of an exhaustive process of community consultation. Just as the project sought to uncover the previously maligned Indigenous histories of the Canning Stock Route, the exhibition seeks to alter the museum experience in order to give Indigenous voices authority within the hallowed cultural realm of the museum. This is certainly a lofty aim, and Yiwarra Kuju has set something of a new benchmark for community involvement in the museum sector. And yet, as with any project this ambitious, it inevitably raises as many questions as it answers.

Central to these questions is the sheer pragmatics of how to present an Indigenous voice within the museum context. To this end, Yiwarra Kuju has opted for a number of bold curatorial interventions. Some of these are simple gestures, such as the decision to hang paintings of the Seven Sisters story near the ceiling, so that one is forced to crane skywards in order to view them; others signify profound philosophical attempts to challenge the classical museum experience.

Nora Nangapa, Nora Wompi, Bugai Whylouter and Kumpaya Girgaba, Kunkun 2008, acrylic on canvas, 124.5 x 294 cm

The most startling of these is the overwhelming amount of support material on display in Yiwarra Kuju. The gallery spaces are simply bursting at the seams with text panels, video displays, text panels, photographs, text panels, multimedia displays and more text panels. In the lavish catalogue accompanying the exhibition, the artist Clifford Brooks declares:

We wanna tell you fellas ‘bout things been happening in the past that hasn’t been recorded, what old people had in their head. No pencil or paper. The white man history has been told and it’s today in the book. But our history is not there properly. We’ve got to tell ‘em through our paintings.

But despite Brooks’ faith in the veracity of painting, the 80 works in the exhibition are accompanied by literally thousands of words of text. The effect is so overwhelming, that one often feels that it is the paintings that are the support material, and not vice versa. Certainly, the aesthetic elements of the works are consistently downplayed in Yiwarra Kuju, and at a recent forum in Melbourne, the co-curator John Carty was at pains to stress, “It’s not about the art.” This raises the inevitable question, why use art as the bedrock for an exhibition that is ostensibly historical in focus?

At the heart of this is a question of cross-cultural engagement. The Canning Stock Route was not a traditional Indigenous passage, but was artificially forged between 1908-1910 by a team led by surveyor Alfred Canning. Cutting across the country of several different cultural and language groups, it was like a colonial scar that paid no heed to the pre-existing borders of traditional ownership. And yet, after its short life as a stock route, the Canning Stock Route was soon appropriated by Indigenous people to facilitate their own movement across country. By using the Stock Route as the locus for the exhibition, Yiwarra Kuju offers a complex double-take, eloquently described by community representatives Ngarralja Tommy May, Putuparri Tom Lawford and Murungkurr Terry Murray as a “two ways” story. On the one hand, the exhibition is all about tradition (the pre-existing ownership and stories that underpin the country the Stock Route bisects), on the other, it is a story about change, adaptation and engagement.

Painting provides the perfect metaphor for this cross-cultural story, presenting a unique testament to the stunning marriage of tradition and innovation. Unfortunately, this is a concept that only gels in a few salient points in Yiwarra Kuju. In part, this is due to the extraordinary democracy of the hang, in which most works are evenly spaced along two black walls, arranged, not according to style or visual affinity, but according to content, in a long run that is intended to replicate the process of crossing country. This curatorial decision creates inevitable visual tensions. There is a massive disparity of both styles and quality across the exhibition, and in many cases, works with similar content are not necessarily visually complimentary. The uniform dramatic spotlighting serves some works well, but it is inappropriate for others, particularly more subtle works, which get lost in the glary haze.

This rejection of traditional notions of aesthetics is symptomatic of the rejection of what are perceived as Western art historical values. This leads to a profound failure to recognise the cross-cultural dialogic work that these paintings already perform. Standing before the most stunning paintings in Yiwarra Kuju – such as those by Rover Thomas, Daisy Andrews or Jarren Jan Billycan – it is difficult not to be taken aback by these artists’ individual ability to create dynamic new visual languages for expressing ancient stories, and in doing so, to take their culture forward in dynamic an unexpected ways. The juxtaposition of related artists painting related stories about related places in vastly different styles raises inevitable questions about the diaspora of style in Western desert painting and the historical and social forces that have shaped its development. This invokes notions on the role of representation, the nature of cultural change and the changing role of aesthetics in Indigenous society.

Rover Thomas, Canning Stock Route 1989, ochre and natural binders on canvas, 105.5 x 60.5 cm, Holmes à Court Collection.

These are necessarily art historical questions that demonstrate the urgent need for new cross-cultural methodologies for Indigenous art history. Yiwarra Kuju: Canning Stock Route offers the first, imperfect steps towards a model of engagement in which Indigenous artists are able to present their history and culture in the manner that they best see fit. This should not mean that it is above criticism, but that it becomes part of an essential ongoing critical dialogue. Perhaps the most exciting thing about the Canning Stock Route project is that with the acquisition of the entire collection by the National Museum of Australia, it will become a permanent resource for future Indigenous artists, curators and historians. Over time, hopefully it will yield many more exhibitions, and through continued engagement with the collection, reveal many more as yet uncovered stories.

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August 16, 2012 · 7:40 pm

Bringing The Dreaming Into View: Tjukurrtjanu: The Origins of Western Desert Art

The following review was published in Art Guide Australia, November/December 2011, pp.55-59

Mick Namarari Tjapaltjarri
Big Cave Dreaming with ceremonial object 1972, synthetic polymer paint on composition board, John and Barbara Wilkerson, New York, USA

According to the anthropologist Fred Myers, the Pintupi cosmos is divided into two contrasting spheres: that which is yuti (visible) and that which is tjukurrpa (Dreaming). The first of these categories, he argues, is phenomenal, the latter noumenal; one can be grasped with the senses, the other “outside human affairs and constitutes an enduring primary reality.” As everything in the Pintupi world is said to have originated in The Dreaming, a third term is needed to describe the passage between these two states – tjukurrtjanu mularrarringu – meaning literally, “from The Dreaming, it becomes real.” Thus, the visible and the Dreaming are inextricably linked, just as the stories in Pintupi paintings are said to be both tjukurrtjanu (from The Dreaming) and yutinu (revealed).[1]

Tjukurtjanu: Origins of Western Desert Art, curated by the National Gallery of Victoria and Museum Victoria in partnership with Papunya Tula, and showing at the NGV presents 200 of the jewel-like masterpieces of acrylic painting on board that emerged from the remote desert community of Papunya between 1971 and 1972. An analogy between the passage from tjukurrpa and yuti might be useful to describe these miraculous paintings, in which the once secret designs of ceremony and ritual were recalibrated into the new, self-contained and secular aesthetic of acrylic on board. If the exhibition’s title stakes an immediate claim to locate the origin of this movement in the metaphysical realm (tjukurrpa), the exhibition itself is more concerned with the tangible processes by which it was made visible in paint (yutinu).

One of the most remarkable achievements of Tjukurrtjanu is how convincingly and comprehensively this emergence is contextualised. The early paintings are situated amongst a sumptuous trove of ethnographic material – including photographs, video, decorated shields, spear-throwers, ceremonial ornaments and pearl-shell pendants – all carefully chosen to reveal the pedigree of the iconographic lexicon from which the Papunya artists drew. Moreover, in the handsome exhibition catalogue, a series of nuanced essays tease out the complex agglomeration of social, historical, cultural, economic and personal factors that catalysed the emergence of desert painting at Papunya in 1971.

If, on the one hand, this wealth of archival evidence serves to show that the emergence of painting at Papunya was not a hermetic moment of artistic epiphany, it in no way detracts from the substantial artistic achievements of this small, pioneering group of artists, nor does it dampen the extraordinary aesthetic power of the paintings gathered in Tjukurrtjanu. A comparison between the paintings and the decorated shields is revealing: although they speak in the same iconographic language, their poetry is radically different.

In one sense, the reason for this difference is self-evident. In ceremony, the meaning of decorated objects such as shields or tjurunga was not autonomously visual, but generated in conjunction with a series of other systems of meaning production that included song, dance, performance or ritual. The first problem of acrylic painting was how to distil this complex accumulation of meanings into the autonomous zone of the two-dimensional picture plain.

Uta Uta Tjangala
Women’s Dreaming 1972
synthetic polymer paint on composition board
Stephen Bush, Coffs Harbour, NSW

The second, more culturally specific problem was how to display this information in a way that did not contravene the strict Pintupi hierarchies of secrecy and revelation. The early painters at Papunya generated considerable controversy over some of their choices of image and motifs, which were deemed to transgress what could be safely represented. Critical opinions on the reasons for such transgressions are divided. In the exhibition catalogue Fred Myers mounts a convincing argument that the artists were simply overly-eager to explore the possibilities of this new medium, while John Kean suggests that it was partly due to the pioneering artist Kaapa Tjampitjinpa’s personality as a maverick prepared to transgress social mores.[2]

But perhaps a simpler answer might lie in the idiomatic conception of these works. In ceremony, the rules of revelation and concealment – of precisely what and how designs could be represented – was always negotiated in advance amongst the ceremonial leaders. In contrast, as curator Judith Ryan notes, the Papunya artists all worked “independently, and not collaborating with others, as customary ritual required.”[3] As the new painting was not governed by these ceremonial rules, there was no firm consensus on the boundaries of representation. Similarly, although drawing on a pre-existing iconographic lexicon, the poetics to which this language could be utilised were similarly fluid. As a result, as Ryan continues, “The early paintings are a series of discrete aesthetic experiments with line, colour and pictorial space that enabled the painters to analyse and objectify the tangible elements of myth and ritual, using a shared visual language and hermeneutics of meaning.”[4]

These experiments are stunningly displayed in Tjukurrtjanu. Each of the twenty artists included is represented with multiple, fine examples of their early work, allowing us to compare both their artistic differences and their individual development of distinctive motifs, styles and iconographies. It is here that we can see the true greatness of these artists, as they each grapple with different conceptual and aesthetic difficulties posed by the translation of traditional iconographies into masterpieces of contemporary art. The sheer inventiveness of these responses is breathtaking.

Freddy West Tjakamarra
Man’s corroboree story 1972
synthetic polymer paint on composition board

The meanings that these paintings express are necessarily difficult for us to grasp – they come from a tradition and worldview that is markedly different to our own. However, this process of experimentation reveals a group of artists using every available aesthetic mean to create cross-cultural explanations of their complex cosmology to an ignorant white audience. Whether out of calculation or exasperation, the medium that these artists chose for this explanation was painting. In doing so, they chose a means of communication that was insistently and undeniably pictorial. If we accept the meaningfulness of this pictorial representation, then it is surely in the systematic refinement of this pictorial message that the best clues to its meaning must lie. It is in this space that the genius of these artists is revealed through their ability to bring The Dreaming into view, to transform tjukurrpa into yuti, and to make compelling contemporary visual statements from an ancient conceptual schema.

Tjukurrtjanu offers a rare opportunity to see these seminal works en masse in order to fully assess the magnitude of their aesthetic and conceptual achievements. This masterfully curated exhibition offers the chance to witness a moment of profound brilliance when all the majesty of ancient traditions were condensed into some of the most extraordinary paintings ever produced in this country. The fact that this movement arose as an aesthetic olive branch stretched across the cultural divide only serves to magnify the munificence of this gesture.

Tjukurrtjanu: The Origins of Western Desert Art  is on display at the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne from 30 September 2011 – 12 February 2011 and the Musée du quai Branly, Paris, from 9 October 2012 – 20 January 2013

[1] Fred Myers, Pintupi Culture, Pintupi Self: Sentiment, Place and Politics among Western Desert Aborigines, Smithsonian Institution Press, Washington, 1986, pp.48-52.

[2] Fred Myers, ‘Intrigue of the Archive, Enigma of the Object’, in Judith Ryan and Philip Batty (eds.), Tjukurrtjanu: Origins of Western Desert Art, exhib. cat., National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, pp.30-31. John Kean, “Catch a Fire’’, in Judith Ryan and Philip Batty, op. cit., pp.48-50. 

[3] Judith Ryan, ‘Aesthetic Splendour, Cultural Power and Wisdom: Early Papunya Painting, in Judith Ryan and Philip Batty, op.cit., p.18.

[4] Ibid, p.18.

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