news | action | information | events | contact | search | news | action | information | events | contact | search |
key indigenous australian issues
| home | news lDiversity and relevanceDream Traces: A Celebration of Contemporary Australian Aboriginal Art Paul Canning
The more things change the more they stay the same: cultural expression through art is part of Australia's current raging 'culture wars', the furious (and fury is definitely part of it) debate about the so-called 'black-arm band' view of history. Gija artists from the Kimberley in the remote North-West created the recent Melbourne exhibition 'Blood on the Spinifex' specifically to highlight their oral history of massacres in the region early last century. Massacres denied by Keith Windshuttle in his book 'The Fabrication of Aboriginal History' and backed up by powerful people including the Prime Minister and numerous prominent right-wing commentators. Says Michael Tucker, Professor of Poetics at the University of Brighton and co-organiser of Dream Traces: "It is precisely through painting that Aboriginal artists did so much to maintain, defend and develop their cultural and spiritual identity". But the continuity between those bark paintings in 1962 and today's booming Aboriginal art market lies not just in the response to ongoing culture wars. If Dream Traces and it's accompanying symposium had any main point it was to say that Aboriginal art is not what you think it is; it's extremely diffuse, not divided into urban vs. traditional – and it's evolving. This goes to a central lesson from any study of any culture, which Western eyes are taught to ignore when that culture appears to be so different from our own, which is that culture itself isn't set in stone, immobile forever. Aboriginal art reflects the changes in Aboriginal people themselves, who are not monolithic, and their relationship to their own culture and the wider world.
It featured contemporary paintings, printmaking, sculpture, batiks, video and photography from many of the most well known artists, with a particular focus on women artists. Dream Traces was the biggest showing of Australian Aboriginal contemporary art in England since the 1993 and 1997 shows at the Hayward Gallery, London and the Museum of Modern Art, Oxford. A symposium on 3 + 4 May 2003 accompanied the exhibition and featured leading authorities in the field, such as Nevill Drury, Anna Voigt, Rebecca Hossack and Herb Wharton. Tucker: "we wanted a multimedia show, highlighting the vitality of Aboriginal art and how in key it is with modernist ideas. It was very much not an ethnographic exhibition but a celebration of coming art; lyricism put into context." But, referring to Aboriginal art's obvious context, says Tucker, "it was a political show, in it's own way." One strong theme of the show was exploring black/white relations Numerous speakers at the symposium also focussed on the vitality and strength of Aboriginal art. Matthew Tobin described spectacular new installations at Sydney Airport by Judy Watson and Brooke Andrew, which reference fish traps and termite mounds. He also described his own work in collaboration with Queensland's Cape York artists, underlining that those working in remote communities are contemporary and their culture very much alive to possibility. Another key message from Dream Traces is that this art has relevance to everyone. Herb Wharton, the well-known writer and Kooma elder, talks in the catalogue about the legend of St George and the Dragon being the English Dreamtime. Told by Dream Traces organiser, the London gallery owner Rebecca Hossack, of where the legend is supposed to have occurred and of a sort of 'dreaming track' (near Oxford), Wharton though; "these people do have a dreamtime but have forgotten how it relates to the land. For here like in many other places, the point to buildings that are a few hundred or thousand years old as the start of civilisations. But these buildings are in fact only dates in time built on the dreaming tracks of other times." "There's a moral to this ancient English dreamtime story of the bush tucker vandal, the dragon and the landscape surrounding the hill. That is that Mother Earth is sacred to all tribes. It's not an offence to take form here – so long as you give something back." "To western eyes," says Rebecca Hossack, "contemporary Aboriginal paintings can often appear as glorious abstract patterns, and yet to the artists they represent something between an ordinance survey map the book of genesis and the good food guide. Marks, dots, blobs, stripes and circles that seem purely decorative are in fact signs and symbols rich in meaning." Says Tucker: "Why should non-Aboriginals wish to partake of at least a little of the spirit of the dreamtime which activates so much Aboriginal art today, as it has done for so many millennia in the past?" "In an age when we are driven by the so-called logic of free market economics of a western political mind-set and sent to complementary sleep by the hyper-technological powers of the Hollywood dream machine, contemporary Australian Aboriginal art may help us to wake up: to dream better - faster and deeper - of life's possibilities." "Aboriginal art has long proven itself to be as dynamic and flexible as it is deeply rooted in an essentially animistic and mythopoetic sense of the world - what Wally Caruana [author of numerous books on Aboriginal art] calls 'the great spiritual theme common throughout Aboriginal Australia' Says Nevill Drury, speaking about Rover Thomas: "Values were in the right place and we could learn so much from it." Many have been reluctant, with Aboriginal art often being categorised as 'ethnic', and dismissed. Says Hossack: "The [British] critics – with a few honourable exceptions – have struggled to come to terms with the movement. Hamstrung by anxieties about their own ignorance or wary of the minefield of political correctness, they have anxiously dismissed the art as 'ethnic franchising' or ignored it all together. There has been almost no attempt to describe its variety and abundance. And yet, amongst the public, a recognition that here is art of the highest order: It has made an appeal to the old, the young, the culturally informed and the first-time viewer: Artists in particular have responded with enthusiasm." Certainly Dream Traces was a local hit, although none of the London critics could be bothered to make the 60-mile journey down to the delightful seaside town of Brighton. Over 1000 schoolchildren visited the show. Another issue at the symposium was that of appropriation (Brit Susann Hanstein expands on copyright theft in particular in her article 'Aboriginal art — Selling out Aboriginal culture: yesterday, and today?' for ENIAR). Jonathan Jones of the Art Gallery of NSW locating it within a history of ethnocentrism and a western 'circus' around Aboriginal people. Interestingly, almost all the symposium's speakers were white, but white people have long played a role in the short history of modern Aboriginal art (previously the art was largely fugitive, temporary). From the introduction by art teacher Geoffrey Bardon of acrylic paint to desert people near Alice Springs in the early seventies through Drury to Hossack herself. They, says Hossack, helped release "a Niagara of talent." Linked to questions about appropriation are questions of 'authenticity', which Tucker said 'floated over the exhibition'. Another speaker, Will Stubbs (Arts Coordinator of the Buku-Larrnggay Mulka Centre, the art centre at Yirrkala) wondered how the growth of commercial art would affect Aboriginal social structures. In a general context where sales room records are being smashed, Australian Aboriginal art is being promoted by a major new French gallery devoted to indigenous art and even Prince Harry is creating work with obvious Aboriginal art influences isn't it time that somewhere like London's Tate Modern Gallery got in on the movement? This show was an excellent survey of the best work, both contemporary and historic, and as such deserved a much wider audience. related links :
|
Urgent action ‘From Little Things Big Things Grow’ Music by The GetUp Mob! Kev Carmody and lots more
|
|
Dream Traces, part of the Brighton Festival, was, say it's organisers "drawn from the most productive and exciting areas of Aboriginal life today, from Arnhem Land in the north of Australia to Sydney in the South."
