It began with Kaapa Tjampitjinpa

Posted: 22 Sep 2011  |  By: Patricia Anderson - Editor

In the early 1970s, Aboriginal artists began transferring onto boards and canvases, stories from the ‘Dreamtime’ which had formerly been created as sand paintings. Writer Anne Summers, who lived for a while on a reserve among the Pitjantjatjara people in Amata in Central Australia, recalled in her book Ducks on the Pond how the people drew in the sand while they talked. “Sticks, fingers or toes were used to draw circles, waves and dots that seemed somehow connected with their conversations. When the talking stopped, the design would usually disappear with a sweep of the foot.”

Thus, essentially ephemeral works which used ochres, small stones, feathers and twigs became both permanent and portable. The growing interest by collectors, dealers and museums in this work would create excitement among both the black and white communities. It would encourage some unscrupulous selling procedures, generate complex copyright questions and create confusion over authenticity. Whose hand — or hands — had produced the work?

By the end of that decade works had been created which were amongst the most compelling abstract paintings to make their appearance in this country. In 1980, The Art Gallery of South Australia hung a Clifford Possum Tjapaltjarri painting in its permanent collection and in the 1981 Perspecta exhibition at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, curator Bernice Murphy included works by Clifford Possum Tjapaltjarri, David Malangi and John Tjakamarra.

What had prompted this efflorescence? In 1971, a teacher, Geoffrey Bardon, had arrived at Papunya, a few hundred miles north of Amata and west of Alice Springs. He provided his young students from the Pintubi and Walpiri tribes with acrylic paints and masonite board and encouraged them to paint murals. One day a group of seven ‘senior’ men began a mural on a school wall. Bardon recalled: “I noticed that one alert fellow … Kaapa, seemed to be in charge of the other painters, telling them what to do.” Bardon wanted to encourage them to paint, not in the western idiom, which they seemed to think was the requirement, but with their own symbols. He pointed to the wall and said to Kaapa: “Are these ants proper Aboriginal honey ant? Nothing is to be white fellow.” The six other painters stopped their work and crowded around to examine what he had painted. “Not ours,” he said “yours.” After conferring in whispers with another group of fellows, Kaapa returned, took up his brush, and painted the true honey ant figure — or hieroglyph. This, said Bardon, was the first acrylic version of the Honey Ant Dreaming, and it would be the beginning of the Western Desert painting movement led by Kaapa. “The Aboriginal men saw themselves in their own image … on a European building. Something strange and marvellous was set in motion.” Bardon began selling their efforts, acting as agent but foregoing any commission. It has been suggested by some — and refuted by others — that the artists, understanding that their works would be sold, found ways to conceal or camouflage the sacred elements, which might explain the increasingly prominent use of dots in Papunya paintings after 1973. The paintings on board and canvas were popular, sold quickly and won prizes. Among the early Papunya painters were names that are celebrated today: Turkey Tolson Tjupurrula, Clifford Possum Tjapaltjarri and Billy Stockman Tjapaltjarri, Uta Uta Tjangala, Tim Leura Tjapaltjarri and Ronnie Tjampitjinpa. In 2000, these developments would climax in an extraordinary exhibition at the Art Gallery of New South Wales called Papunya Tula: Genesis and Genius.

In June 1972, the works of the Papunya people were shown at the new Information Centre at Civic Centre, Canberra, in an exhibition opened by the Minister for the Interior, Mr Hunt. But it would be a handful of private galleries such as Hogarth, Utopia and Adrian Newstead’s Coo-ee Gallery in Sydney and Gabrielle Pizzi and William Mora in Melbourne which would contribute to the sustained interest in this art form and made it available to collectors here and abroad. Clive Evatt’s Hogarth Gallery which opened in 1976 was one of the first showing and selling Aboriginal bark paintings. In 1978, he had two works for sale by Yirawala, leader of the Gunwinggu Tribe of western Arnhem Land, whose work had been assiduously collected by the National Gallery of Australia. This tribe was distinguished for its ‘X-ray’ paintings of animals with their internal organs exposed.

The state galleries have been, in the main, latecomers to the party and only in the last two decades have they committed larger and permanent spaces to their growing collections of such works. One of the most important collections, the Ramingining works, assembled by curator Djon Mundine, forms the spine of the Aboriginal holdings of the Museum of Contemporary Art.

One resilient interpretation of Aboriginal culture appeared in 1986 from the travel writer and novelist Bruce Chatwin. He visited the outback — not for very long and apparently without much of a nod in the direction of the local experts — and delivered a book called Songlines. With this publication, regardless of the criticisms it incurred, he may have done more than any other author to reach the imagination of a vast number of readers, both here and abroad, to illuminate the relationship of the Aboriginal people to the land. It was this relationship with the land that generated paintings of great formal beauty and originality.

None of this would have cut any ice with the organisers of Cologne’s international art fair, Art Cologne. In 1994, they snubbed a group of Aboriginal painters represented by Gabrielle Pizzi, refusing exhibition space on the grounds that the works were ‘folk’ art, not contemporary art. There was a furore and pressure from many quarters — including embarrassed German art critics — and the decision was reversed. Even so, views once aired hung about. How did one define folk art? Whatever else, it hinted at collective activity, which Aboriginal art, like other indigenous cultures, fosters.

In the 1990s, astonishing sums began changing hands for contemporary Aboriginal art and in 1999, the Australian Government, alarmed that important examples of Indigenous art — in particular the ‘dot’ paintings of Papunya from the early 1970s — were leaving the country, established permits which would be required for the export of works older than twenty years and worth more than $10,000. This focused attention on their place in Australia’s cultural heritage. Sotheby’s Aboriginal art specialist Tim Klingender believed it was important for such works to be seen both overseas and here, but added: “I don’t have a problem with the Australian Government banning the most significant works from export, but if they did, they should make the funds available and buy the works themselves.” The government’s National Cultural Heritage Committee did not process the permits in time for the Aboriginal art auction of May–June 1999, but the international buyers appeared unfazed. They bought eight of the top ten works for sale, the highest price being $162,000 for a work painted in 1972 by Mick Namarari Tjapaltjarri.

Eight months later the permits still hadn’t materialised and no decision had been made by the aforementioned committee about whether the works could leave the country. There were, unsurprisingly, disagreements among its members. This left buyers in limbo and also the sellers who had not received payment. Klingender said: “One might say that some of them are terribly upset.” Gabrielle Pizzi, whose Melbourne gallery had done so much to expose the local and European community to the Papunya artists, anticipated another complication. “Collectors … I think, will turn their attention perhaps to other art movements and areas where there are not these difficulties and restraints.” The escalation in sales and the value of these sales can be seen from the following figures. Aboriginal art sales in 1990 were worth $170,000. In 1999, they had reached $4.7 million. In June 2002, Sotheby’s annual auction of Aboriginal art turned over $5.3 million; in July 2003, it was a staggering $6,077,161.

In 1993, Telstra sponsored a prize of $20,000 for the National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art Award, which had been an annual event since 1983. By 2000, the prize money had doubled and it was awarded that year to Kenny Williams Tjampitjinpa, a relatively unknown artist of the Pintubi tribe. In 1996, it went to Kathleen Petyarre, who, along with Emily Kame Kngwarreye, was in the fast current of excitement swirling around women painters. Petyarre’s paintings often involved a gravitational pull to the centre where four lines met at a point and divided the canvas into four segments of seething yet subtly marshalled activity. These are ‘mental maps’ of the ancestral lands she travelled across as a child with her extended family. When she carried off the Telstra windfall in 1996, with a painting called Storm in Atnangkere Country II, there was a small snag when her former de facto husband claimed a hand in the creation of the winning work. In May 2001, the Museum of Contemporary Art hosted a retrospective of sixty of her works.

One of the most recent enthusiasms of collectors is the work of Dorothy Napangardi. In 2001, she won the 18th National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art Award with a work of breathtaking beauty and delicacy. This was Salt on Mina Mina, in which threads of pigment wove themselves with great fragility across a black rectangle of canvas. It was as if an ancestral being had woven dew-laden cobwebs into a loose tapestry to suggest a cosmic landscape. Napangardi’s works are charged with her experience of a women’s ceremonial site in the Tanami Desert known as Mina Mina, but she has evolved her own language, not the traditional iconography that is part of the knowledge of her family group. In December 2002, the Museum of Contemporary Art honoured her with an exhibition of her works produced over the previous decade called Dancing up Country.

There were a disproportionate number of deaths among high-profile members of the Aboriginal arts community at the end of the twentieth century and the start of a new one. Kaapa died in 1989, but his wife Eunice Napangardi, who had been an apprentice to him and helped him with his works in the early 1980s, emerged at the end of the decade as an artist in her own right. Her work featured in the exhibition Modern Art-Ancient Icon, which travelled to Washington 1992, and she was commissioned by the Alice Springs airport to paint a work for its opening in December 1991.

Lin Onus, whose Hills hoist festooned with carved fruit bats is a virtual fixture at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, died of a heart attack in 1996. He was just forty-seven. He was honoured with an exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art in 2000 called Urban Dingo: the Life and Art of Lin Onus. Perhaps more than any other artist, Onus, whose mother was Scottish and whose father was Aboriginal, bridged the divide between the black and white artist communities, incorporating effortlessly the images and modes of both cultures in his paintings and sculptures. Johnny Warangkula Tjupurrula, famous for having painted Australia’s most valuable canvas, died in February 2001 aged seventy-five, after discharging himself from a nursing home and returning to his family at Kintore. His painting Water Dreaming at Kalipinypa remains one of the most electric and complex of works produced by any Aboriginal painter in this country. Turkey Tolson Tjupurrula died in August 2001 of complications following a kidney disease. He was, as far as anyone could estimate, not yet sixty. This caused some difficulties for Christie’s, which was preparing to auction his Straightening Spears for a figure estimated at between $40,000 and $60,000. The issue? The use of a photo of Tolson in the catalogue. It was an Aboriginal central desert custom that a dead person’s name not be mentioned or their image shown to relatives for a period of ten years.

Yangarriny Wunungmurra died in January 2003. He was the last survivor of sixteen tribal elders who had worked on two panels to hang in the church at Yirrkala, which showed for the first time in public, the origins of life, land and the law. It had been a gesture to harmonise local (Yolngu) tribal laws with Christian beliefs. Writer Howard Morphy described his technique of painting as ‘sublime’, saying: Wunungmurra’s paintings were “frequently segmented into a complex mosaic of images integrated within a framework of exquisitely executed cross-hatched diamond designs of his Dhalwangu clan”. Morphy remembered arriving at Gurrumurru outstation in 1976 and seeing a magnificent bark painting propped against the side of a corrugated iron hut. It was acquired by the Australian National University. Later, a fabric manufacturer copied the image from a catalogue to reproduce on tea towels and clothes. Wunungmurra’s work incorporated his clan’s sacred design, and when he discovered it had been reproduced without anyone seeking his permission to do so, he stopped painting for ten years.

Work from the East Kimberley region, especially Turkey Creek, came to prominence with the work of Rover Thomas, a former stockman who died in 1998. True Stories: Art of the East Kimberley, which opened at the Art Gallery of New South Wales in January 2003, paid tribute to a painter who had inspired other artists from the region. Thomas’s life had been shaped by his years as a drover and his life at the meeting point of white and Indigenous cultures. He was one of many driven out of their traditional lands and obliged to seek employment as stockmen, roustabouts, cooks and domestics. His minimal shapes and subdued palette of umber, ochre, cream and black in traditional ochres and gum was all the more distinctive when compared to the riot of brightly coloured dots, feathers and waves that washed through the galleries and craft outlets around Australia. And his surfaces were anything but static. Some were crusted or gritty, with tiny hairs and fibres suspended in them. Dots of pigment occasionally flaked off, leaving faded shadows and a suggestion of physical fragility. The slow pulsing of open space and line which never halted at the edge of the canvas seemed to defy the western notion of ‘enclosure’ — of putting a fence or a wall around a space, or fixing a painting in a frame — yet Thomas often applied a neat border of dots around the perimeter of his works. Perhaps it was a concession to western sensibilities. His paintings and those of Trevor Nickolls were Australia’s entry to the 1990 Venice Biennale.

Clifford Possum Tjapaltjarri died in June 2002. Earlier that year he had been admitted to Alice Springs Hospital with concussion after a blow to the head. Like Namatjira, he had little to show when he died for the money he’d earnt, and his last days were not happy ones, mired as they were in disputes over the authorship of many works which bore his signature. Emily Kame Kngwarreye died in 1996, aged eighty-six. Her story is perhaps the most ascendant of all the Aboriginal artists to date. Curator Hetti Perkins had first seen her work in 1989 and was dazzled by the “wonderful profusion of colour, energy and light”. Kngwarreye, who was seventy-eight, had begun painting just one year earlier. Her energetic skeins of colour, which wound in and around every corner of the canvas, or her deltas of feathers and stipples seemed to belong instantly and effortlessly to the oeuvre established by Jackson Pollock, yet she had lived a life of almost complete isolation. In 1992, she was awarded a Keating Creative Fellowship ($110,000) and in 1995, when the National Gallery of Victoria commissioned Big Yam Dreaming, its Director Timothy Potts declared: “This is Australia’s Blue Poles.” In 1998, the Queensland Art Gallery arranged a travelling exhibition of her work.

Today, one of Australia’s most celebrated living Aboriginal artists is Tracy Moffatt - a photographer and filmmaker whose psychological and technical range has captivated the easily jaded New York art world as well as the local scene. When Daniel Thomas launched her survey exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art in December 2003, he suggested that Moffatt captured “the humiliations and ecstasies in our own backyard” and “the tragedy at the margins of our attention”.

The previous year, her series of nine brilliantly coloured photographs, Something More, sailed through the secondary art market to sell for $226,575 at a Christie’s auction. Moffatt must have pondered their curious journey. She had conceived them as a ‘story’ about a young girl setting out to seek a better life in the city, only to be met with tragedy before she arrived. They had been produced in 1989 and sold for $2500. Did Moffatt find a better life in the city? What happens when an Aboriginal artist has an ascendant career in the art world, which is by definition a white world. Tracy Moffatt said: “I have never been a mere social issues-type artist, in fact my work has never been BLACK. (If there is such a definition.) I have made a point of staying out of all black or ‘other’ shows (except once, years ago, [when] my work wasn’t even well known but even then I felt it was a step backwards in my career).”

By 2010, the issues surrounding the efflorescence of Indigenous art had become more complex and tangled. There is confusion over new rulings related to buying art for personally managed superannuation funds and over the resale royalty which returns a percentage of the price of a painting to the artist each time it changes hands. There are disagreements both personal and philosophical over the access private dealers and buyers have — or don’t have — to the growing numbers of Indigenous arts centres and the mechanisms for the exhibition and sale of these works. And finally, a great tide of work, which can charitably be called ‘potboilers’, has washed through galleries and shops throughout Australia. Separating the wheat from the chaff is of considerable importance for the long-term profile of Indigenous art in Australia, just as it is for western-style artists.

Images from top:

Clifford Possum Tjapaltjarri, Warlugulong, 1976.

David Malangi, Two water goannas and fresh waterhole, 1983.

Kenny Williams Tjampitjinpa, Untitled, 2001.

Uta Uta Tjangala, Untitled, 1971.

Albert Namatjira, Catherine Creek, Northern Territory, c.1950

Emily Kame Kngwarreye, Untitled (Anhalker), 1992.

Lin Onus, Fruit Bats, 1991.

Turkey Tolson Tjupurrula, Straightening the Spears, 1998.

Kathleen Petyarre, Untitled, 1990.

Rover Thomas, Two Men Dreaming, c.1985.