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NON-EUROPEAN AND INDIGENOUS CULTURAL PRODUCTION
Research: Post Modernism and Indigenous Art
“The first surge of interest in tribal artefacts as ‘high art’ came through the Cubist and Surrealist artists at the beginning of the 20th Century. Both movements were concerned with sculpture, manifested in Cubism chiefly through the rendering of volume in planar representation, in Surrealism through the heritage of the Dada object trouvé and the use of exotic imagery in either two or three dimensions to suggest the workings of the subconscious mind in concrete form.. the appeal of tribal art had nothing to do with the actual intentions of the societies which had created it.” (Quote: p8 Aboriginal Art Catalogue)
It is only since the 1970’s that there has been a greater understanding of the intricacies of Aboriginal art by the wider community. Teacher and author, Geoffrey Bardon did much to encourage the artists of Papunya Tula to take on the materials of the European artist. This allowed what were previously impermanent sand drawings to become both a teaching tool and a commodity. The authorities at Papunya did not like Bardon having such close contact with the Aboriginal people. His encouragement of their art was seen as interference and the wall murals he organized to decorate the school were later painted over.
Galleries in Alice Springs were happy to take the works painted on board using PVA and poster paints. The subsequent sales gave the artists independent earnings and the profits went towards group owned items such as a vehicle.
Bardon also encouraged the artists (men at this stage) to describe the Dreamtime Story that the image represented. When it was realized that the work would be viewed by non-tribal people some of the stories were either modified or disguised.
The people of the Western Desert were some of the last to come under the influence of the European. This meant that they were able to retain much of their Dreamtime traditions.
The people most affected by the coming of the Europeans to Australia were the Aboriginal tribes of South Eastern Australia.
The coastal tribes of NSW, Victoria and South East Queensland had the earliest contact with the white European settlers. The conflicts over land use and devastation by contacting previously unknown diseases such as Small Pox led to fewer numbers and those that were left were ‘converted’ to Christianity and discouraged from any show of their Dreamtime culture.
The swiftness of foreign intrusion into the South East of Australia, from Coastal South Australia through Victoria and New South Wales to Queensland meant that the indigenous population was unable to adapt their culture to the changed circumstances.
There are few representative pieces of artwork left from this region. Some museums do hold rare artifacts such as shields that show these groups had a style of their own. One exceptional artwork is a possum skin cloak held at the Melbourne Museum. The skins are sewn together with kangaroo sinew and each pelt is incised with a clan design.
The cloaks were considered heirloom items and passed down through generations. When highly decorated such as the one shown above, they were worn at ceremonies by men. Lesser cloaks were used for warmth in the cooler areas of the Eastern states. They were used as cloaks, blankets or for keeping babies warm.
The Eastern tribes also had carved trees and rock art. The meanings of these works are largely lost.
While the tree carvings were an art form used only in Eastern Australia, Rock Art appears in most regions.
Different areas of Australia have different traditions in the way in which they depict their Dreamtime stories.
The people of the Western Desert used sand paintings before transferring their stories to canvas while the people of Arnhem Land have a tradition of bark painting. The Tiwi however are more renowned for their sculptural works, particularly their large carved and painted mortuary poles made on the occasion of a death along with painted spears, arm-bands, head-dresses and bark baskets.
This shows art styles are as varied as the number of Aboriginal groupings throughout Australia.
While some groups guard their traditional methods of making their art, others such as the Papunya people have embraced the new technologies now on offer.
One of the first to embrace the European style of painting was Albert Namatjira of the western Arrernte people near Hermannsburg near Alice Springs, Northern Territory. His images were once viewed as images in line with European pictorial conventions, however now it is suggested that his images may be coded meditations on traditional sites and sacred knowledge which would give his works more in common with the dot paintings of the nearby Papunya Tula artists.
Namatjira’s seemingly traditional European style of watercolour paintings became an iconic decorative item of the 1950’s. Many of his works were produced as prints, making them available to households throughout Australia.
Not only were his works sought after for the novelty of being painted by an Aboriginal but his subject matter of the inland of Australia fascinated those who lived in the coastal cities who would never have the opportunity to visit the places depicted.
Albert Namatjira and his family, who also took up the art of water colour, opened the way for a new generation of Aboriginal artists in both their Dreamtime traditions and also in the newer forms of art in the wider community.
Thancoupie is another Aboriginal artist who has taken up a non-traditional form of art. Thancoupie was born in 1937 in Napranum, a small village near Weipa in west Cape York Peninsula. She began her career as a preschool teacher and established the first kindergarten in Napranum in 1967. In 1971 she travelled to Sydney and enrolled in Ceramics at the East Sydney Technical College.
Today Thancoupie is well established as a leading ceramic artist and acknowledged as being the foremost Indigenous Australian potter. She draws inspiration from traditional legends of her Thainakuith culture and translates these traditional stories into contemporary visual images.
Thancoupie works tirelessly for the Napranum community and she takes a particular interest in arts education for children and young people. Her commitment to educating children about their traditional culture is highlighted by the holiday program run in Weipa. She is a highly respected Elder in her community, and has been involved in the political struggle for native title rights for many years.
(Quote: http://www.visualarts.qld.gov.au/storyplace/artist_thancoupie.htm)
Her work sells well to collectors of Australian ceramics and recently one of her pots was cast in aluminium and is displayed in the foyer of a public building in Far North Queensland.
While other Aboriginals have taken up Ceramics, their work has been seen as part of a co-operative. Thancoupie has been recognised as an individual artist.
In Aboriginal culture clay is used for body paint and decoration of artifacts rather than for making sculptures or vessels. Sometimes the coloured clay is rolled into balls and dried so that it can be transported from one site to another or in the old days it may have been traded between groups for use in sacred ceremonies.
There was no traditional use of clay as a medium for making vessels or sculptures.
By learning the art of ceramics Thancoupie opened up new ways of teaching the young people of her area. The recording of Dreamtime stories in the design of her vessels allows Thancoupie to express her intricate relationship with the land and creatures of her country.
Her sculptural vessels are symbolic forms - egg shapes are fertility symbols, spheres are the earth and the cycle of life.
Thancoupie has held 16 solo exhibitions and many combined exhibitions throughout Australia and overseas and she is represented in all major collections.
In 1986 she was appointed Australia's Cultural Commissioner to the Biennale of Sao Paulo and she has had solo exhibitions which toured through South America and to Houston, USA. In 2001 she was honoured with a retrospective exhibition at the Brisbane City Gallery.
In 1998 she was appointed a Doctor of Griffith University for her services to Aboriginal Arts. She is regarded as North Queensland's leading contemporary artist and has inspired a recognisable regional style of indigenous art.
(Quote: http://www.jenniferisaacs.com.au/thancoupie/)
Thancoupie’s work has retained the colours of the earth with oxides highlighting the designs. It is the medium which is new while the work retains the traditions of the people of Weipa.
For other artists the modern colours available in acrylic paints has been enthusiastically embraced.
In the 2005/6 travelling exhibition, Colour Power, curated by Judith Ryan for the National Gallery of Victoria, nearly every work contains brilliant use of primary colours. This exhibition brought together many different works by contemporary Aboriginal artists. The work titled, White Tree- bush orange 2000 by Eileen Mbitjana Kaytetye is a good example of the use of colour now that many Aboriginal artists are using acrylic paints.
In her work, White tree – bush orange, Eileen Mbitjana Kaytetye follows the tradition of story-telling while incorporating European representation of trees. She uses vibrant colours to represent the land and trails in ways not available to previous generations.
Well known artist, Emily Kam Kngwarray, was also represented in the exhibition, Colour Power. Kngwarray took up painting late in life and yet produced a startling amount of work.
Ntange Dreaming is about the artist’s country after rain which is considered to be the ancestral powers fertilizing the earth. In this painting she has used the same technique as would have been used to paint the bodies of the women taking part in the ceremonies around the collection of grass seeds which ripen at this time, that is, using the hands to place the paint on the canvas.
Like artists of Papunya Tula, Kngwarray has disguised details of parts of the traditional story. In doing this she has developed her own technique which gives the paintings an abstract gestural style which transcends the traditional art form.
Other contemporary Aboriginal artists have chosen the modern medium of photography. Tracy Moffat was brought up in a white Foster home in Brisbane and graduated from the Queensland College of Art in 1982. While identifying as an Aboriginal and expressing her support for Aboriginal causes, her work is of International interest.
In 1989 Albury Regional Art Gallery commissioned her series titled Something More, in which the artist stages puns on the possible meanings of the title. Showing herself in a red Asian dress in the foreground, another woman in white leans against the doorway of a wooden house and two children and a man in a coolie hat are seen in the background. Moffat seeks to confuse meanings of cultural identification and question the authenticity of the presentation by reinforcing its own ‘fake’ construction. The other images in this series presented variations of this idea.
Moffat has become known for ‘creating’ pictures rather than ‘taking’ pictures. In her 2005 series Under the Sign of Scorpio she dressed herself as various well known women who, like herself, were born under this star sign.
They included Bjork, Joni Mitchell, Vivien Leigh and Catherine Deneuve, and she used her bathroom in New York as her studio for the shoots.
Since moving to New York to live Moffat has collaborated with Gary Hillberg to use clips from old Hollywood movies. Lip used clips of black actresses playing maids, which was an ‘acceptable’ movie role for actresses in Hollywood at that time but Moffat has chosen clips which show how the actresses added their own personality to the role. The clips show the maids being sassy or giving a witty putdown to their screen employer. Moffat says this series has a personal resonance as her birth mother worked as a domestic and also as a cook.
A recurring theme in Moffat’s work is that of the relationship between mothers and daughters.
Shown at the Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery in Sydney earlier this year, Moffat has again used video clips from movies to put together a montage showing actresses depicting mothers and daughters.
MOTHER is a twenty minute film clip montage of mostly Hollywood movies depicting unforgettable Mother characters. Gary and I have cut together scenes of Mothers from some of the greatest dramatic movies ever made. For example: Stella Dallas (1937), where Mother (Barbara Stanwyck) is not invited to her daughter’s wedding and watches it standing outside in the rain; Imitation of Life (1959) in which the fair skinned Daughter (Susan Kohner) can’t acknowledge her black mother (Juanita Moore). Scenes like these have always ‘cut me up’.
MOTHER is a roller coaster of emotions: fight scenes between mothers and daughters, but also comedic moments and scenes where a lot of love is shown. Included are funny clips from 1970’s TV shows, such as Mary Tyler Moore (where Rhoda’s Mother - Nancy Walker - comes to visit), and Maude (Bea Arthur), featuring television’s favourite Feminist Mum. The montage ends dramatically as Mothers turn into heroic protectors of their young. In Aliens (1986) a machine-gun toting Sigourney Weaver yells; “get away from her you B…h!” MOTHER ends with a scene of a pregnant Native American woman trudging in the snow to give birth. A message of the film could be very simply: ‘It is tough to be a Mother’.
Tracey Moffatt, 2009 (http://www.roslynoxley9.com.au/news/releases/0000/00/00/169/)
Tracey Moffat represents the modern Aboriginal artist making use of modern technologies. Moffat uses photography and film in ways that give universal appeal to the drama of the human condition.
Other indigenous artists choose to tell stories that reflect what it is to be an Aboriginal in Australia today.
Ricky Maynard is an indigenous photographer who came to prominence in 1988 with a photo essay on Aboriginal Mutton bird farmers. An important aspect of Maynard's work is to leave proof about indigenous people where it has previously been absent or distorted. His images of mutton-birding in Tasmania were featured in After 200 years, Photographic Essays of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders in Australia Today and are now held in the collection of the National Gallery of Australia. Apparent in his work is a commitment to represent his people and his belief in the value of documentary photography as a tool to effect social change.
Throughout 2007 - 2010 Maynard's touring solo exhibition Portrait of a Distant Land, will travel to 9 locations including the Australian Embassy Paris, Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery and the State Library of Victoria, Melbourne. The Museum of Contemporary Art, who will host the exhibition during 2009 have published a monograph to accompany the tour. The series Portrait of a Distant Land (exhibited at Stills in 2009) began in 2005, marking key historical sites and events with great significance to Tasmanian Aboriginal people. (http://www.stillsgallery.com.au/artists/maynard/index.php?obj_id=about&nav=0)
Fiona Foley is another Aboriginal artist who has chosen to work in non-traditional media.
Artist, activist, curator and writer, Fiona Foley stands at the forefront of cultural-political discourse in Australia. Standing witness to a history of trauma, invasion and dispossession, her sculptural installations and photographs are sometimes angry, sometimes satirical, often humorous, always political.
A descendant of the Badtjala people who were forcibly removed from the island of Thoorgine (Fraser Island) at the turn of the twentieth century, Foley engages fearlessly with the reclaiming of historical narratives, and of the land itself.
(Quote: http://www.octobergallery.co.uk/art/foley/signpost_2.shtml)
Marrnyula Mununggurr works in both the traditional bark painting of her ancestors as well as making lino cut and screen prints.
Living in her ancestral home in North Eastern Arnhem Land, Mununggurr recently had work included in the group exhibition, Making it New: Focus on Contemporary Australian Art at the MCA in Sydney.
Following in the footsteps of her father, she is recognised in her community as an accomplished painter on bark. She has transferred her skills to the art of print making and is Manager of the printmaking workshop at Buku-larrgay Mulka Cultural Centre near Gove NT.
Her themes are both traditional stories and modern lessons. For example she was commissioned to produce an anti-Aids awareness poster in 1994.
Many of her works show traditional designs of her people. They are a little similar to the Tiwi designs as they have quite detailed patterns in several colours.
A Waradgerie artist who has chosen to combine her traditional weaving practise into the contemporary sculptural art is Lorraine Connelly-Northey of Victoria.
Born in Swan Hill in 1962 Connelly-Northey is of Aboriginal and Irish heritage. She likes to mix those cultures and celebrate the traditional work of Aboriginal women as gatherers encompassing narrbongs (string bags), coolamons (bowls), digging sticks and possum-skin cloaks. Her inspiration comes from the Mallee and Riverina bush where she grew up. She produces sculptural works by collecting and reusing materials to reflect a traditional Aboriginal lifestyle. These found materials may include both the industrial and organic such as corrugated iron, fencing wire, feathers and shells. Her knowledge of Aboriginal coil weaving transforms the recycled materials into traditional forms such as Coolamon and dilly bags. Since 1991 her exhibitions have been shown in the Melbourne Museum, The Object Gallery and at Aboriginal and Pacific Art, Dank Street, Waterloo.
While having the feel of the traditional Aboriginal string bag, Connelly-Northey produces sculptural forms which are as iconically Australian as the sculptural Monaro landscapes of Rosalie Gascoigne.
The art of the Australian Aboriginal is as diverse as its people; from the urban to the bush, traditional to the contemporary in various styles and media it would seem Aboriginal art in 2009 is in a very healthy state.
While many would only consider the conservative dot paintings of the Western Desert artist such as Clifford Possum or Rover Thomas as depicting Australian Aboriginal art, this would be under-valuing the enormous contribution that Aboriginal artists are making to the world of art in this country.
Their innovative approach to new materials, media and technology will help to sustain their culture into the future.
References:
• Books:
o Catalogue – Aboriginal Australia, National Gallery of Victoria,Art Gallery of Western Australia, Australian Museum, Queensland Art Gallery 1981-1982 Sydney.
o Bardon, Geoffrey1991, Papunya Tula – Art of the Western Desert, JB Books Australia, Soft cover edition, Marlston, SthAustralia.
o Catalogue – MCA Collection: New Acquisitions in Context, Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, 19 August – 6 November 2005, Sydney.
o James, Bruce 1999, Art Gallery of NSW Handbook, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney.
o Caruana, Wally 1989, Windows on the Dreaming, Ellsyd Press, Chippendale.
o James, Bruce 1999, Art Gallery of NSW Handbook, Art Gallery of NSW, Sydney.
• Websites:
o http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Possum-skin_cloak
o http://www.artistsfootsteps.com/html/Namatjira_mthermannsburgac.htm
o http://www.visualarts.qld.gov.au/storyplace/artist_thancoupie.htm
o http://www.craftunbound.net/medium/ceramics/review-of-from-the-earth-contemporary-indigenous-ceramics
o http://www.jenniferisaacs.com.au/thancoupie/
o http://cs.nga.gov.au/Detail.cfm?IRN=119248
o http://artsearch.nga.gov.au/Detail.cfm?IRN=148563
o http://www.abc.net.au/rn/arts/sunmorn/stories/s1525932.htm
o http://www.diacenter.org/exhibitions/introduction/46
o http://www.abc.net.au/rn/arts/sunmorn/stories/s1525932.htm
o http://www.roslynoxley9.com.au/artists/26/Tracey_Moffatt/1169/
o http://www.stillsgallery.com.au/artists/maynard/index.php?obj_id=about&nav=0
o http://www.aboriginalartnews.com.au/2008/
o http://www.yirrkala.com/prints/artists/artist.php?id=5
o http://www.octobergallery.co.uk/art/foley/signpost_2.shtml
o http://www.ngv.vic.gov.au/crossingborders/biography/lorraine_bio.html
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