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key indigenous australian issues
| home | news lFrom the outside looking inby Michael Eather 5 April 2003 - As with her key dreaming subject, the mountain devil lizard - a tiny reptile that changes its skin Since she started painting with her sisters and relatives (including Kathleen, Violet and Ada Bird) in the late 1980s, alongside other well- known artists and relations such as Emily Kngwarreye and Lindsay Bird, Petyarre has ceaselessly experimented and explored in paint the forms of her country and culture with confidence and clarity. Six years ago, Petyarre pushed minimalist styles to another level, creating the striking bush medicine leaf patterns - dense bushels of repetitive and urgent brushstrokes. This won her the Wynne Prize in 1999 at the Art Gallery of New South Wales. Now it seems it's time to push the envelope again. Aware that painting styles are scrutinised and emulated by her peers, Petyarre has started a new body of work that surely will evoke accolades and cynicism when viewers first confront it. It's the duality of doubt, the contradiction and the sheer audacity that succeeds in these works. Her new work appears to be pure painting, not "folk art" as Richard Bell has commented. There is no apparent cultural reading or obvious ethnographic symbolism in her work. Petyarre will tell you - and indeed she emphatically stated this in a recent artists' floor talk - that her designs have always been related to her Dreaming Awelye, the mountain devil lizard. But it seems there is one condition: We as the audience have to join those dots and make that connection ourselves. So herein lies the problem: How do we, as outsiders, read these works? In European cities today, I've met many well-meaning people who struggle with the concept that a lot of the recent Aboriginal works produced for museum shows are in fact "contemporary" and heralded as such by the curators. This can be largely traced to an analytical debate on regional classifications, indeed, "boundaryism". These outside people acknowledge that the works are made "in the present", but contemporary must mean their exclusion from the very tradition they expose. So in reading works by Aboriginal artists living in remote areas of Australia - because the works are produced in the context of a traditional cultural base - we see their Aboriginal art as something else, indeed, "something more". What is that "something more"? If it isn't the spiritual allure, then it must be the collision of our cultures desperately trying to search for reasons to believe each other. This opens up the other "international question": Can urban-based Aboriginal art be "traditional" as many exponents maintain it to be? In my experience, roughly the same number of outside people who struggle with the contemporary thing struggle with the traditional thing. Petyarre has certainly positioned herself as one of Australia's leading painters. Her prolific nature has caused some commentators over the years to raise their eyebrows as to her production rate, but she has always been in demand, so she calls the shots. This follows that now almost textbook pattern of successful Aboriginal artists: not so much saturating the market as just dominating it with works that at first disarm people, then become highly desirable and internationally recognisable, hence very collectable. While so many urban-based Aboriginal artists for years have been valiantly trying to erase the ingrainedcolonial stereotype of cultural classifications - most notably internationally renowned artists such as Gordon Bennett and Tracey Moffatt refusing to show in Aboriginal-only exhibitions - the abstract painters of the desert and Kimberley, the Cape and other "exotic locales" continue to confront us with pure paint and ochre concoctions. The commercial conundrum is that for so many people used to European ways, it's the story that is the driving force or selling point behind this minimalist veil. Recently I saw a series of incredibly evocative, yet minimalist and tough, ochre paintings by Paddy Bedford, Freddie Timms, Peggy Patrick and others from an excellent exhibition depicting oral histories and recollections of massacre stories and incidents from the East Kimberley. One canvas is just a thick wash of red ochre with a line of white dots surrounding the edges of the empty rectangular vessel. The title of the painting: Bedford Downs Massacre. Who is left to tell the stories of these forgotten chapters in Australian history? The answer: Just keep staring into the red ochre void. Stories are buried inside there - just keep looking. Stories everywhere. Carry on, Gloria. Source: The Courier Mail relative links :
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its one year on from the Australian Governments controversial intervention into NT Indigenous communities
action Roll back, listen to Indigenous community voices speaking about the intervention |
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