Aboriginal Art: Sacred and Profane. - Review - book review

Anthony White

Susan McCulloch. Contemporary

Aboriginal Art: A Guide to the Rebirth of an Ancient Culture.

Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1999. 240 pp., 135 color ills., 6 b/w. $39.

Statistics may often lie, but in the case of Australia's Aboriginal people and their art, the numbers tell quite a story. One recent estimate has it that the sales of Aboriginal art from Australia--more than 50 million U.S. dollars per year--outstrips that of nonindigenous Australian artists by three to one. As Melbourne-based art writer Susan McCulloch points out in her preface to Contemporary Aboriginal Art: A Guide to the Rebirth of an Ancient Culture, this is an extraordinary statistic given that Aborigines constitute less than 2 percent of the country's population (10). Even more extraordinary, however, are the health statistics of Aborigines, which continue to remain at Third World levels: for example, their incidence of kidney disease is seventeen times that of non-Aboriginal Australians. [1]

These appalling health conditions are but one consequence of the violent dispossession that Aborigines have suffered during two centuries of European colonization. Against the background of this troubling history, the recent upsurge in the production and marketing of Aboriginal culture as art might seem yet another instance of colonial exploitation. However, as McCulloch points out, this visually stunning work in a variety of media has the potential to inform the world about Australian indigenous societies, maintain the vibrancy of Aboriginal culture, and bring direct economic benefits to Aborigines. In an effort to more fully realize this potential, the author sets out to provide a historical and social background to Aboriginal art along with detailed information on how to view and purchase it. Partly as a result of its sweeping scope, however, McCulloch's book raises as many questions as it answers, and often leaves the reader wanting. Nevertheless, it is a handsome volume that serves as a user-friendly fi rst stop for the novice Aboriginal art enthusiast.

McCulloch has divided the considerable body of Aboriginal art into four chapters, each of which concentrates on a specific geographic area. This division into distinct groupings is important because, as she stresses, the mythology which forms the basis of this work "is not one simple belief system, but many systems specific to the hundreds of different tribal groupings occurring throughout the continent" (22). The widely different narratives, characters and locations that form the content of Aboriginal art are matched by an equally great diversity of styles, materials, and working techniques that often reflect the place of origin. On the one hand, the paintings composed of shimmering, highly colored fields of small dots--which dominated exhibitions of Aboriginal art in the 1980s--largely emerge from the central desert areas of Australia. On the other, artists from the Kimberley region in the northwest use dots sparingly to outline broad areas of ochre color. Such regional variations in the art are made abund antly clear by the very layout of this hook.

Equally, by locating the art within its respective geographic area, McCulloch emphasizes that this work emerges from Aborigines' deeply felt connection to the land. In art objects, dance performances, and bodily adornment, all of which are occasions for mythic narratives, Australia's indigenous people maintain and communicate their historic belonging to physical place. Given that specific works by Aboriginal people such as the famous Bark Petition, Yirrkala of 1963 have been used as evidence in legal ownership claims to specific Australian territories, McCulloch's insistence of the relationship between art and land has a political implication in the ongoing struggle over indigenous land rights. Unfortunately, she does not give enough detail on precisely how this connection between a people and their land is expressed through art, preferring to gloss that relation with phrases such as "a spiritual link with their country" (23).

Another reason to applaud McCulloch's choice of a region-based survey are the varying colonial histories of each area. The contact between indigenous and European peoples has certainly seen Aborigines forcibly dispossessed of their traditional lands. However, this was no uniform invasion but a series of multi-faceted histories. As the author documents, the approach to colonization varied significantly from one region to the next, some areas experiencing a harsher kind of dispossession than others. One of the biggest differences are those observable between the northern Arnhem Land people, who were able to sustain a relatively continuous proximity to their ancestral lands and cultural practices, and the central desert peoples, such as the Pintupi, who were literally rounded up during the 1950s and put into combined reservations far from their own territories (16). This difference in colonial history is reflected in the artwork; the beautiful Arnhem Land barks--with their figurative designs incorporating repea ted linear bars of highly contrasting color--demonstrate a more observable continuity with ancient cave art than does the Western Desert "dot" style of painting with earlier indigenous art forms (143-44).

A geographic focus also allows McCulloch to emphasize the social and historical factors that have impacted each region and its art differently, such as Aboriginal attitudes to the dissemination of their culture and the efforts made by non-Aborigines to promote art production. For example, no paintings were produced at the desert community of Lajamanu until 1985 because the then chair of the community council opposed the production of artwork for sale to non-Aboriginal people, believing that indigenous culture would be threatened by its inclusion in museums (35). Furthermore, unlike the Papunya community, where central desert painting began in 1971, the desert community of Utopia continues to be dominated by women's art because modern-day art production started there in a batik workshop run as part of a women's adult education course (79-80). By outlining these elements McCulloch adds a level of complexity to her account, demonstrating that the form this art takes is connected to a range of historical factors , not all of them exclusively concerned with traditional Aboriginal mythology.

Indeed, one of the great merits of the author's approach is that rather than shying away from the relation between Aboriginal art and non-Aboriginal society, McCulloch has taken that particular bull by the horns. The international market for contemporary art is one of the key players in the story she tells. The impact of the sudden growth in art sales is briefly documented, giving an idea of how Aboriginal societies have been affected by this activity in both positive and negative ways, thus acknowledging the art collector's contribution to contemporary Aboriginal life. One of the effects of this commercial interest has been the prominence of certain individual artists. McCulloch singles out better known artists such as Emily Kame Kngwarreye and Rover Thomas, giving an account of their respective styles' historical development. This more individualized analysis, presented in brief sections outside the flow of the regional survey, presents an alternative means for understanding the art; while the idiosyncrati c nature of individual artists' work is recognized and celebrated, it is still framed within the context of the artist's region of origin.

In keeping with the function of the book as a guide to art collectors, throughout the discussion can be found explicit details on how art is distributed and sold. At the back of the book there is even a "Buyers Guide," which includes a helpful discussion of the problems of authentication into which Aboriginal art has fallen, and a consideration of recorded incidents of deliberate fraud. Furthermore, at the end of each chapter can be found detailed lists of artists, museums, and art dealers relevant to the geographic areas covered, including addresses and contact details. While most of the book is a pleasure to read because of the simple language and clear layout, the informational sections that close each chapter are not clearly distinguished from the rest of the text by a different kind of formatting or presentation. As a result, the reader often feels bogged down in detail. There is also a certain redundancy between sections as repeated information starts to pile up. A more efficient way to present this ma terial would have been to move it all to an appendix at the back of the book. Conversely, a separate geographic map included in each chapter would have been a great help--I found myself continually flipping back to the rather limited map buried somewhere in the book's introduction.

Where the book has more serious limitations is in the imprecise language used to describe the visual qualities of the works. The author often employs qualitative terms without explaining their meaning. For example, one sentence reads "Stylistically, Papunya art remains--with a few individual exceptions--quite formal" (61). Perhaps what is meant here is "orderly," but this is not clear at all from McCulloch's discussion. Even more baffling is the caption "Gloria Petyarre's works are often characterized by a strong, clear element of design" (82). The problem is that Petyarre's Untitled (Leaves) of 1995, the work to which this comment applies, is an "all-over" painting composed of brushy, painterly dabs of acrylic which evinces neither any design, nor any sense of clarity. While Contemporary Aboriginal Art is intended as a guide rather than an in-depth study, it should have provided more precise language to account for the obvious visual appeal of the works: one of the main reason that collectors are drawn to p urchase the art.

Part of the problem here may be connected to the argument the author makes in the introduction that "Western notions of aesthetics are rarely those motivating the creation of Aboriginal art" (23). Elsewhere in the text McCulloch does acknowledge the importance of visual appearance to Aboriginal art, and she is certainly right to argue that there is more to these works than what Europeans have historically called "beauty," particularly in the idealist, disinterested sense. However, any outright refusal of Western aesthetics must be qualified. To begin with, objects that Aboriginal people have made for sale as art have been affected by the contemporary standards of taste in the non-Aboriginal world. To take an example, it was only in the 1970s, when the art-buying public was sufficiently prepared by the history of Western painting to consider abstraction as a legitimate mode of art production, that the elimination of figurative elements from central Australian desert art was possible. And, as McCulloch herself documents, the scale of individual bark paintings from Arnhem land has grown considerably over the years "in line with contemporary art practice" (147).

Moreover, the visual appeal that these works hold for Western-trained eyes is not contrary to their cultural significance for Aboriginal people. As McCulloch notes for the creators of Yirrkala bark paintings, works characterized by the dazzling effect of numerous small areas of high-contrasting color, "of prime artistic concern is creating works of sharp brilliance to evoke the living spirit of ancestral power" (173). Here the author is on firmer ground than in other visual descriptions, but the connection between form and content is lacking in specific detail. As Howard Morphy has explained in his book Aboriginal Art, the connection between brilliance and power is mediated for certain Aboriginal artists by the apparently miraculous appearance of natural phenomena such as rainbows, moving water, or sunsets, phenomena considered to be manifestations of ancestral forces in the land. [2] McCulloch's reticence on this point impedes her goal of introducing the reader to the deeper significance of Aboriginal art. Directly addressing the question of what non-Aboriginal viewers find "aesthetic" in indigenous Australian art is a powerful means of encouraging an appreciation of the cultural meaning behind these complex and beautiful works.

A further difficulty is presented in the chapter "Urban and New Forms of Art," where McCulloch has placed the work of Aboriginal artists living in Australia's cities. The use of the combined phrase "Urban and New" is misleading: almost every artwork she considers in the book has some aspect of "newness" about it, as in the use of neon colors and acrylic paint in the extraordinary Wild Yam (1989) by Michael Jagamarra Nelson from the central desert region. Furthermore, in Australia the term urban applied to Aboriginal art has tended to carry invidious connotations of the nontraditional and therefore "inauthentic." There are distinctions to be made between the work of artists living in remote areas with a more immediate and continuous connection to Aboriginal culture and those in the cities whose experience of traditional mythology is more mediated. However, the lines are not clear, and contemporary experimentation on the part of rural-based artists with new media and techniques demands more circumspection on t hat issue. Another fault in this section was the absence of any illustration of the work of Gordon Bennett, one of the most significant Aboriginal artists to emerge in the last twenty years.

In spite of these drawbacks, McCulloch has written a book that will serve as a convenient and attractive introduction to a field of art that is continually growing in importance at the international level. While writing this review, I was asked a question about a particular body of work by Emily Kame Kngwarreye, the Yam Dreaming series (1995); from this hook I was quickly able to get the relevant information, including dates, physical description, and places to view and purchase the work. As a guide it had passed the most important test of all -- it is informative and easy to use.

Anthony White is Curator of International Painting and Sculpture at the National Gallery of Australia.

(1.) See Joyce Morgan. "The Art of Living," Sydney Morning Herald, August 17, 2000.

(2.) Howard Morphy, Aboriginal Art (London: Phaldon Press, 1998), 185, 189.

COPYRIGHT 2000 College Art Association
COPYRIGHT 2001 Gale Group