Author: Tony Clifton
Publication: The New York Times
Date: April 24, 2003
Australia's Aborigines may have
created one of the world's oldest art forms and have certainly created
one of the newest. Travelers in the remote outback of central and northwestern
Australia can see cave paintings and rock carvings that date back at least
30,000 years. Then they can drive back to the big coastal cities and buy
paintings by direct descendants of those ancient artists, who use modern
paints and canvases but still refer to symbols and images that may predate
the oldest cave paintings in Europe.
"We can see a very clear connection
between rock art and contemporary art," said Hettie Perkins, an Aboriginal
woman who is the curator of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander art at
the Art Gallery of New South Wales in Sydney. "The same communities that
made rock art are making the art we see today."
Thirty years ago Aboriginal work
was hardly recognized as art. Painted tree bark and ritual stone and wood
objects, spears and clubs tended to be lumped together with stuffed koalas
and wallabies in the ethnographic sections of Australian museums; Aboriginal
art was never displayed in the same spaces as work by white artists.
Less than 20 years ago "you could
barely give it away," said Tim Klingender, director of Sotheby's Aboriginal
art department in Sydney. "People just didn't take art made by Aboriginal
painters seriously."
"But at our sales in July," he said,
"we'll have people from all over the world bidding hundreds of thousands
of dollars for art you could have bought for hundreds in the 1970's. We're
estimating a total sale value of more than $3 million."
Essentially Australian Aboriginal
art is religious art or has its origins in religion. Whether on rocks,
in the sand, in clay patterns, on human bodies, on tree bark or now on
canvas, the art is largely about sacred ancestor figures and their travels,
totemic plants and animals and creation stories dating to a distant past
that has become known as the Dream Time. In a society that has no written
language, this art is part hymn book, part map, part biography and part
illustration in the Western sense.
So an artist like Kathleen Petyarre,
60, who saw her first white man when she was 10, will produce a painting
that to an outsider looks like an elegant abstract composition of dots,
streaks and broken lines. She explains: "The lines at the top are where
the green pea grows in the sand ridges. And that patch is a water hole,
and this line is the tracks the thorny devil makes when he goes to visit
his ancestors." (The green pea is her totem plant; the thorny devil, a
small, brightly colored desert lizard, is her totem animal.) Asked if she
made a preparatory drawing, she said: "No, I paint straight on the canvas.
It's all in my head."
The vivid, portable Aboriginal art
made in Australia today dates back only to 1971, when a young teacher named
Geoffrey Bardon arrived at Papunya, a remote government settlement for
nomadic tribal people in the desert about 160 miles west of the central
Australian town of Alice Springs.
Like all Aboriginal tribes, the
people of the region had senior men and women who were artists, charged
with creating decorated stone and wooden objects and painting the bodies
of participants in sacred dances. Mr. Bardon brought them modern acrylics,
encouraged them to paint their ancient stories on portable - and salable
- wooden boards, and set up the first artists' cooperative to produce and
market the results. Canvas painting came soon after.
Mr. Bardon did not teach anyone
how to paint, but he changed the medium and was a tireless promoter and
marketer. His idea that artists should form cooperatives to make and sell
their own art has been copied by communities across Australia and is the
main platform for production and sale of Aboriginal art today.
Aboriginal artists all over Australia
now practice canvas painting, and distinct styles have evolved. The artworks
of the central and western desert, which includes Papunya, use the modern
palette, purples, pinks, fluorescent greens and yellows, and are often
made up of thousands of dots of color. The artists of Arnhem Land in the
tropical, coastal north make art on bark and canvas, using blacks, yellows
and browns to depict ancestors and totemic animals.
The painters of the Kimberley region
in the far northwest literally use earth colors, black, red, brown and
white clays, ochres and sand. These austere, calm paintings can resemble
aerial maps of the desert and have struck a special chord with collectors
and museums. The current record price for an Aboriginal painting - $490,000
- was paid for a work by the Kimberley artist Rover Thomas, a former cowboy.
All these schools are to be represented
at the Sotheby's sale in Melbourne in July. The most extraordinary painting
offered, estimated to sell for around $300,000, will be an enormous western
desert painting, "Ngurrara Canvas No. 1." Some 26 feet wide by 23 feet
deep, it was painted in 1996 by 19 men and women working on a canvas spread
out in a remote part of the Great Western Desert in the state of Western
Australia. The painting was made to show Australian government ministers
and officials the ancestral lands and sacred places claimed by a group
of tribes from the region.
"This is a historical Australian
document," Mr. Klingender, of Sotheby's, said. "It really should be bought
by the government for the nation, although it would be ironic if they did
because the land claim hasn't been recognized yet."
This is a painting based on traditional
themes, but Aboriginal art is also changing. Young Aboriginal artists are
making photographs, installations and conceptual art and are depicting
modern urban life as well as the Dream Time.
Samantha Hobson, 21, from the Lockhart
River settlement on Queensland's northeast coast, has produced a series
called "Bust 'Im Up," about drunken brawling in the small community of
about 800 people. Her art is splashed with scarlet smears of what could
be fresh blood, the crimson of clotted blood and tangles of black, like
torn-out hair.
For a picture in the National Gallery
of Victoria in Melbourne, she has written this caption: "Seems like every
big night, Thursday, Friday night, specially at the canteen and parties,
man and woman fight."
It is not pretty or mystical. "But
it tells you about how some Aboriginal people have to live today," said
Margo Neale, an Aboriginal woman who is a gallery curator and an editor
of the Oxford Companion to Aboriginal Art and Culture.
The one group of Australian citizens
rarely seen in galleries and salesrooms selling this exciting and expensive
art are Aborigines themselves, who are too poor to buy the products of
their own culture.
It was not until 1967 that these
original inhabitants of Australia were even given the citizenship of a
country they settled as long as 60,000 years ago. Today the 410,000 people
who claim Aboriginal ethnicity have the lowest average income of any Australians,
the lowest life expectancy and the poorest health. That their art survives
at all, let alone thrives and is admired around the world, may be a true
Dream Time miracle.