No Boundaries: Australian Aboriginal Contemporary Abstract Painting

No Boundaries

Aboriginal Australian Contemporary Abstract Painting From the Debra and Dennis Scholl Collection

Paddy Bedford Jananggoo Butcher Cherel Prince of Wales (Midpul) Tommy Mitchell Ngarra Billy Joongoora Thomas Boxer Milner Tjampitjin Warlimpirrnga Tjapaltjarri Tjumpo Tjapanangka

DelMonico Books • Prestel Munich London

New York

Edited by Henry F. Skerritt With contributions by John Carty Edwina Circuitt William L. Fox Stephen Gilchrist Jens Hoffmann Darren Jorgensen Emily McDaniel Ian McLean Fred R. Myers Una Rey Luke Scholes Henry F. Skerritt Quentin Sprague

This publication accompanies the exhibition No Boundaries: Aboriginal Australian Contemporary Abstract Painting from the Debra and Dennis Scholl Collection. Nevada Museum of Art, Reno, NV February 14–April 26, 2015 Portland Institute for Contemporary Art, Portland, OR June 20–August 15, 2015 Pérez Art Museum Miami, Miami, FL September 17, 2015–January 3, 2016 Charles H. Wright Museum of African-American History, Detroit, MI January 17–May 15, 2016 Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY June 11–August 14, 2016 Published in 2014 by DelMonico Books, an imprint of Prestel Publishing. Prestel, a member of Verlagsgruppe Random House GmbH Prestel Verlag Neumarkter Strasse 28 81673 Munich Germany Tel.: +49 89 4136 0 Fax: +49 89 4136 2335 Prestel Publishing Ltd. 14-17 Wells Street London W1T 3PD Tel.: +44 20 7323 5004 Fax: +44 20 7323 0271 Prestel Publishing 900 Broadway, Suite 603 New York, NY 10003 Tel.: +1 212 995 2720 Fax: +1 212 995 2733 E-mail: [email protected]

Editor: Eugenia Bell Design: Miko McGinty and Rita Jules Printed in Italy by Trifolio S.R.L., Verona, Italy, featuring their extended gamut system AreaW4

Contents

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any other information storage and retrieval system, or otherwise without written permission from the publisher.

David Walker

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data No boundaries (2015) No boundaries / John Carty, Edwina Circuitt, William Fox, Stephen Gilchrist, Jens Hoffmann, Darren Jorgensen, Emily McDaniel, Ian McLean, Fred Myers, Una Rey, Luke Scholes, Dennis Scholl, Henry Skerritt, and Quentin Spraque. pages cm Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 978-3-7913-5449-1 1. Painting, Aboriginal Australian--21st century--Exhibitions. 2. Painting, Abstract--Australia--Exhibitions. I. Skerritt, Henry F., 1979- No boundaries. II. Title. ND1101.N6 2015 759.994089’9915--dc23 2014040009 Front cover: Warlimpirrnga Tjapaltjarri, Wilkinkarra, 2012 (detail), see p. 145 Back cover: Tommy Mitchell, Walu, 2012 (detail), see p. 83 Endpapers: Tjumpo Tjapanangka, Wiringurru Painting, The Great Sandy Desert, WA, 1998 (detail), see p. 147 Frontispiece: Tommy Mitchell, Nganturn Tali, 2011 (detail), see p. 81 pp. 30–31: Jananggo Butcher Cherel, Floodwater, 1993 (detail), see p. 49 Members of Indigenous communities are respectfully advised that a number of people mentioned in writing or depicted in photographs in the following pages have passed away.

Director’s Preface Preface

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Dennis Scholl

No Boundaries: Aboriginal Australian Contemporary Abstract Painting

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Henry F. Skerritt

Painting Stories, Reading Country

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William L. Fox

Languages of Abstraction

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Jens Hoffmann

Paddy Bedford of Jirrawun: Two-Way Street

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Ian McLean

Jananggoo Butcher Cherel: “Am I a Good Painter or Not?”

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Stephen Gilchrist

Prince of Wales (Midpul): “I Make the Marks”

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Emily McDaniel

Mr. Tommy Mitchell: Pirriya Purlkanya, Big Wind

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Edwina Circuitt

Ngarra: Ulterior Motives, Unresolved Objects

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Quentin Sprague

Billy Joongoora Thomas: Nature, Time, and Painting

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Darren Jorgensen

Boxer Milner Tjampitjin: Portraits of Water

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John Carty

Warlimpirrnga Tjapaltjarri: Powerful Presence in Person and in Paint

www.prestel.com

Fred R. Myers and Luke Scholes

ISBN: 978-3-7913-5449-1

Tjumpo Tjapanangka: Hunting for Balgo’s Contemporary Warrior

132 146

Una Rey © 2014 Prestel Verlag, Munich•London•New York All texts © their respective authors

Notes Bibliography Author Biographies Acknowledgements

164 168 170 173

No Boundaries: Aboriginal Australian Contemporary Abstract Painting Henry F. Skerritt From the arid central desert to the monsoonal tropical coast, remote northern Australia is a land of epic contrasts. Sweeping vistas give way to rocky outcrops, which change from a sweltering umber into a rich sienna in the shifting light. For all its wilderness, one feels constantly shadowed by an otherworldly presence, as though floating between the material and spiritual realms. Nestled amid this natural grandeur are small Aboriginal communities with enchantingly sonorous names such as Wirrimanu, Warakurna, and Kiwirrkurra. Some are home to as many as 5,000 people, others to no more than a handful of families. Living close to the lands that nourished their ancestors, many Aboriginal Australians live in conditions of horrific poverty, marred by overcrowded and dilapidated housing, woeful sanitation, substance abuse, chronic illness, violence, and an epidemic of youth suicide. Aboriginal art is the unlikely product of this interzone. It is the cosmopolitan art of the frontier, designed to travel the world to art fairs and biennials, while remaining embedded in a landscape that few outsiders will ever see, rooted in an arcane cosmology that few will ever understand. No Boundaries features the work of nine Aboriginal contemporary artists from the northwestern quadrant of Australia: Paddy Bedford, Jananggoo Butcher Cherel, Tommy Mitchell, Ngarra, Prince of Wales (Midpul), Billy Joongoora Thomas, Boxer Milner Tjampitjin, Warlimpirrnga Tjapaltjarri, and Tjumpo Tjapanangka. Each rose to prominence near the turn of the twenty-first century, at a moment of rapid expansion in the Australian Aboriginal art industry. Buoyed by unprecedented critical and market success, Aboriginal artists across the country

responded with a series of innovations that challenged the preconceived boundaries of Aboriginal art. The most conspicuous of these was the rise of Aboriginal abstraction.1 Where their predecessors (such as the pioneering artists of Papunya Tula in the 1970s) had drawn heavily on figurative and cartographic imagery, by the early 1990s many Aboriginal artists began to adopt more individuated and abstract modes of art making. It is easy to frame the rise of Aboriginal abstraction as a capitulation to the pressures of the art market, as though these artists were forgoing tradition in favor of more marketable styles. And yet, for all their engagement with the Western art world, Aboriginal art remains defiantly and distinctively Aboriginal. During their lifetimes, the nine men included in No Boundaries were revered as leaders in the communities; among their peers, their knowledge of Law and ceremony was unsurpassed. The anthropologist A. P. Elkin coined the term “men of high degree” to describe such figures, whose command over ancient ritual practices gave them an incontestable authority among their people.2 Painting came in their twilight years, at the time when most would be looking for a quiet retirement. In Western art, we are used to senior, established artists becoming fixed in their ways; stuck repeating the triumphs of their youth. For Aboriginal Australians it is the reverse: it is only because these men were assured in their identity and fully in command of their cultural corpus, that they could leave behind the comfort of old ideas. Informed by a lifetime of learning, their paintings are a priceless archive of Indigenous knowledge. They cannot be divorced from this worldview any more than they can be separated from the global art world for which they are created

Opposite: Prince of Wales (Midpul), Body Marks, 2000 (detail), see p. 73.

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and in which they circulate. In remote Aboriginal communities, art production is one of the only avenues for economic advancement. But its attraction is far more than simply financial. By placing economic value upon traditional knowledge, the art market has (perhaps paradoxically) served to strengthen some traditional practices by giving them contemporary relevance. Long before it became a multimillion-dollar industry, Aboriginal artists painted out of a desire to communicate the persistence and value of Aboriginal culture to the wider world. Abstraction was a persuasive tool for this cross-cultural promulgation, allowing artists to expand their reach through a broadened market appeal, but this was never at the expense of its core political mission: declaring Indigenous sovereignty over their ancestral territories. As Ian McLean provocatively asserts in his contribution to this catalogue, “These paintings are aimed at the Western world with all the power and accuracy of a well-thrown spear.” They are not sentinels protecting a disappearing regime of knowledge; they are occupying forces, spreading their message with persuasive affect.

IS ABORIGINAL ART CONTEMPORARY? It is the ability to cross cultural boundaries without forsaking its distinctive identity that makes Aboriginal art some of the most challenging and important contemporary art being produced in the world today. This is not simply because Aboriginal art is so different from the art being produced in Europe and America—the fetish for “new” and “different” has long shaped art world fashions—but because Aboriginal art manages to retain its difference while pointing to the increasingly entangled networks that define the contemporary condition. “Contemporaneity,” argues Terry Smith, “consists precisely in the acceleration, ubiquity, and constancy of radical disjunctures of perception, of mismatching ways of seeing and valuing the same world.”3 Picturing this differentiated, but inevitably connected whole is the defining feature and challenge of all the most important art being produced today. The cross-cultural success of Aboriginal art is an exemplar of what Nicolas Bourriaud describes as the “invention of relations” 12

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between seemingly incommensurate consciousnesses.4 While this reflects an incredible generosity on behalf of Indigenous artists, it has also been born out of the desperation of colonial necessity. To varying degrees, each of these artists witnessed the superimposition of Western modernity onto the traditional lifestyles of their people. They lived their lives across these two worlds, adeptly negotiating the complex requirements of both Indigenous and Western societies. Produced at the often violent frontier where Indigenous and Western cultures met, their paintings embody a linked history, recognizing our shared occupancy of the world. The experiences of the nine artists in No Boundaries have made them adept at navigating these disparate worlds. In their reflections on Warlimpirrnga Tjapaltjarri, Fred Myers and Luke Scholes describe how, in 1984, the artist and his family emerged from the desert after twenty-two years living nomadically in the wilderness. What followed was a baptism by fire as the family battled to retain their autonomy in the face of competing external interests. The “Pintupi Nine” made international headlines, but as Myers and Scholes note, they represented merely an extreme example of many Aboriginal people’s daily experience of living across two worlds.5 For older artists like Billy Thomas, Tjumpo Tjapanangka, and Tommy Mitchell, the arrival of European colonists occurred during living memory. All three recalled their first encounters with kartiya (non-Aboriginal people), which occurred when they were young boys. Ngarra, on the other hand, was born into the indentured pastoral life of the West Kimberley. In the final decade of the nineteenth century, huge cattle stations spread across the northwest of Australia, cutting across clan-estates that had been occupied for nearly 40,000 years. As a boy, Ngarra fled station life, taking refuge with his grandparents in the rugged Mornington Range. Exiles in their own country, they lived in the mountains, upholding their traditional customs, laws, and ceremonies. His grandparents’ teachings made Ngarra one of the most important ceremonial leaders of his generation. This irony was not lost on him; in his later life Ngarra repurposed the derogatory epithet myall, used to describe “wild bushmen” who supposedly lacked the sophistication needed to make good

pastoral workers. “Myall,” he declared in 2005. “That’s why I’m in the lead with the biggest name all over the world. Station blackfella got no name: just rubbish riding tail.” 6 But even those who grew up on the cattle stations, such as Paddy Bedford, Jananggoo Butcher Cherel, or Boxer Milner Tjampitjin, remained in close contact with their ancestral heritage. Station life allowed Indigenous people to remain in close proximity to their traditional lands, and the wet season provided an annual respite from pastoral labor: a monsoonal interlude when rain locked down the stations and workers could return to their clan estates to tend to ceremonial and custodial obligations. Bedford, Cherel, Ngarra, Thomas, and Boxer Milner Tjampitjin all had long associations with the cattle stations of Western Australia. Lithe and agile, they were the stuff of legends, the famed Aboriginal stockmen, boundary riders skirting the lively but dangerous terrain of the frontier.7 Their skill as horsemen made them prized employees, an occupation that brought them into close contact with Europeans. But if black and white worked side by side on the stations, they occupied different worlds, remaining always “strange relatives.” Despite their toil, Indigenous stockmen were denied the economic benefit of their country’s pastoral exploitation.8 Nor did the strangeness of the frontier soften over time. By the time Prince of Wales (Midpul) was born in 1938, three generations had passed since the arrival of British settlers in Darwin, the traditional lands of his Larrakia forebears. Still, as Emily McDaniel recounts in her essay, Midpul found his people pushed to the fringes, shunted from view as the city prospered. Like all the artists in this exhibition, Midpul realized that a powerful tool was required to communicate across this cultural chasm. From the very onset, art was a means of crossing this frontier, of communicating the complex beauty of Indigenous culture across the colonial divide. The ease of abstract paintings to circulate in the art market offered an irresistibly compelling platform. In a more intimate sense, it also engendered highly personal relationships. Many essays in this volume speak of the profound creative partnerships developed between Aboriginal artists and their white facilitators, advisors, and gallerists. Whether in the “two-way”

paradigm of Paddy Bedford and Tony Oliver described by Ian McLean, or the near-familial bond shared by Ngarra and his confidant Kevin Shaw, as related by Quentin Sprague, such collaborations are striking personifications of the possibilities for intercultural camaraderie. Their collaborative nature in no way diminishes the agency of these artists, but rather, reveals the richness of what Una Rey dubs their “crosscultural dance.” The danger of such a dance is always the risk of assimilation: of being overwhelmed by the dominant colonial identity. In a political sense, Aboriginal art was spectacularly successful, becoming the preeminent symbol of Aboriginal identity and sovereignty. However, with its focus on precolonial narratives and the Dreaming cosmology, many critics feared that Aboriginal art played into the Western fetishization of difference, forcing Aboriginal people into an impossible performance of authenticity.9 In his essay on Ngarra, Quentin Sprague gives powerful voice to these continuing concerns. And yet, while it may not have entirely resolved these issues, the emergence of Aboriginal abstraction was, in itself, a strategic response to this critique. It is hard to imagine that the early Papunya Tula artists ever anticipated the level of international visibility that Aboriginal art would achieve. While many critics have rightly noted that increased abstraction was an attempt to obscure the secretsacred elements of Dreaming narratives, it also prevented the reification of identity. In Darren Jorgensen’s words, these paintings exist on the “cusp of our understanding.” As the philosopher Édouard Glissant argues, this opacity serves as a safeguard to protect diversity against assimilation by the Other.10 Thus, abstraction served a tripartite function: not only did it facilitate engagement with the colonizers via its ease of circulation in the art market, but it also resisted the kind of rigid identity positions that could be easily stereotyped or primitivized, while helping to conceal secret ceremonial knowledge. Instead of offering fixed, essentialist identities, Aboriginal abstraction draws attention to the relational nature of identity, reminding us that all identity is shaped through our engagement and encounter with each other. If contemporaneity is defined by the presence of competing ways of viewing the same world, Aboriginal art’s ability to no boundaries

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communicate this difference cross-culturally, without sacrificing its own identity, places it at the forefront of international contemporary art practice.

IS ABORIGINAL ART ABSTRACT? In his essay on Boxer Milner Tjampitjin, included in this volume, John Carty declares, “Words like abstraction, landscape, or representation fall short of these paintings.” Why then do we persist with such labels? The obvious reason, as Carty knows, is that they are the only critical vocabulary currently available. If we are to say anything meaningful about Aboriginal art, we need to consider such terms as placeholders, open to revision and redefinition as required. This is not simply an exercise in semantics, but rather, can reveal the hidden assumptions, antinomies, and inconsistencies that underlie how we think about art. The ascendency of Aboriginal art in the 1970s occurred at a critical juncture in Western art history, when the dominance of late modernism was being rapidly usurped by a range of new, socially engaged, performative, and conceptual modes of art practice. This was fortuitous timing; part of the success of Aboriginal art was that it appealed to both sides of this critical divide. On the one hand, these visually brilliant canvases with their affinity to late-modernist abstraction appeased nostalgic modernists who hoped these desert prophets could resuscitate the formalist tradition. And yet, as Ian McLean argues, “Whatever cheer modernists may have got from [Aboriginal] painting, its artworld ascendency was only possible because of the perceived exhaustion of modernism.” 11 Buoyed by the radical ideas of the 1960s and 1970s, a younger generation of artists and critics sought out more visceral modes of art production, to which Aboriginal art seemed a perfect fit. Artists like Sol LeWitt, Marina Abramović, and Imants Tillers, all saw kindred spirits in the artists of remote Australia. To them, any similarity between Aboriginal art and modernist abstraction was simply a case of mistaken identity. Far from being the world’s finest abstractionists, in 1989, the curator and critic Nicholas Baume declared Aboriginal artists to

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be its leading conceptualists: “In a ‘Neo-Conceptualist’ age, the lingering desire to look beyond the painted surface to its conceptual base is gratified by Aboriginal art. It produces a language of symbols just waiting to be made verbal. It not only caters to conceptual taste, but the social integration of its ideas makes the attempts of Conceptual art look amateur.”12 Baume was referring primarily to the artists from Papunya Tula, who in the early years of the 1970s, pioneered the classical iconography of circles, arcs, lines, and tracks that became synonymous with Western Desert “dot” painting. In the early marketing of these works, it became accepted practice to accompany each painting with a schematic diagram that identified the meaning of each iconographic element. As a result, many Australians—such as Baume—interpreted these icons as being akin to a visual language. Aboriginal paintings were thus read as a form of ancestral cartography: elaborate maps documenting specific geographic sites and the creation narratives associated with these places. This represented a remarkable political advance, and Aboriginal art has been the leading mechanism through which non-Indigenous Australians have gained some insight into the centrality of place to an Aboriginal sense of being. But the nature of this “language of symbols” is not quite as secure as Baume’s reading makes out. For a start, the graphic system is decidedly multivalent: any individual icon can hold several different (and often simultaneous) meanings. As Fred Myers notes, “extragraphic knowledge is often necessary to interpret the representation.” 13 In a ceremonial context, the precise meaning of these icons would be explained and negotiated according to the particular knowledge or custodial interests of the various participants. In her pioneering 1973 ethnography, Nancy Munn notes that the cartography of desert painting is relational: “the site-patterns form a ‘language’ for the macro-temporal rhythms of nomadic movement from place to place.”14 In this “nomadic” understanding of country, places are not understood in their isolation, but through their intersections and connections. These paths reflect the ancestral mythology of the Dreaming

(or creation time), when spirit beings traveled across the landscape creating all things. But the Dreaming is not restricted to the past: ancestral presence remains a residue in the thickened present, discernible to those whose ceremonial knowledge, kinship, or custodial ties allow them to access it. Among Indigenous communities, a senior person’s knowledge of country and its ancestral underpinnings are central to his or her identity and cultural status. This connection to country also links a person’s identity to the ancestral narratives (or Dreamings) associated with that place. This is quite different to a Western dialectic of self and other, because each Dreaming represents but one section of a larger continuum of the Dreaming songline. Prior to colonization, hundreds of Aboriginal language groups lived, not so much “side by side” as in the nation-state model, but overlapping, like links in a chain of songlines that traversed the continent. As part of this chain of Dreamings, individual identity was constantly remade through the processes of negotiation with other ritual “owners” along the songline. Thus, an Aboriginal understanding of both place and self are relational; their meaning comes from their position within a network. Like any network, this meaning shifts and changes, depending on the relative positions of those interacting within the network. Fred Myers observes, “contact with others and the necessity of response, of visibility and negotiability in all forms of action” is central to Aboriginal social life, and as a result, “social boundaries are not prominent.”15 The same might be said of Aboriginal paintings: while their indexicality to the land is intrinsic to their meaning, the precise nature of this meaning is forged in the confluence of exchange, negotiation, and relation. This is my definition of abstraction: meaning is provisional, imagery is iconomorphic, and understanding is contingent on dialogue and the platform of exchange. If early advocates were divided between those captivated by Aboriginal art’s aesthetic brilliance and those who celebrated its conceptual prowess, one thing Aboriginal art shows clearly is that this distinction is peculiar to Western modernity. This demarcation of aesthetics into an autonomous domain of

judgment separate from practical reason is one of the lasting legacies of the philosophy of Immanuel Kant. In the hands of Clement Greenberg—arguably the most important theorist of late modernist art—this separation was used to justify a teleological drive toward nonobjective abstraction. For Greenberg, the aim of modernist painting and sculpture was to create a pure, autonomous, aesthetic experience that referred to nothing outside itself. A painting that tried to create an imitation of the world (that is, a representation) was destined to be an inferior copy. A modernist did not copy reality, but rather, created an original: a “tragic and timeless” world unto itself. When, in the heightened political climate of the 1960s, artists began to challenge the indifference of Greenberg’s model of formalism, many rejected the concept of aesthetics outright.16 One of the most pressing lessons of Aboriginal art is that aesthetics are rarely ever devoid of meaning.17 In recent years, an increasing number of contemporary Western artists have been catching onto this lesson, as Jens Hoffman illustrates in his essay in this volume. Rather than chasing an illusory nonobjectivity, these Western artists are looking for new, nonverbal forms of communication, what Hoffmann aptly dubs “languages of abstraction.” As a “language,” however, abstraction stresses poetics as much as semantics. This in no way lessens the communicative intent of these works. As Glissant argues, poetics are always an act of relation: “It is the way in which we make our imaginary concrete” in order to communicate it to others. Aesthetics in this sense is not intended to transcend reality, but rather, “brings us back from the infinities of the universe to the definable poetics of our world.”18

CAPTURING THE WORLD IN A SINGLE DOT During the 1990s, many Aboriginal artists abandoned the iconic archetypes that had formed the backbone of early desert painting. However, their work remained deeply connected to the landscape.19 It was more a shift of emphasis: artists were less interested in communicating the specifics of Dreaming narratives, sacred sites, or ancestral movements, in favor of more affective transactions. Rather than representing “country,”

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these artists seemed more interested in capturing the essence of being in country: expressing the physical force of nature, rather than its iconic description. In his essay in this catalogue, William Fox boldly breaks down the Kantian distinction between representation and reality: “The maps were paintings were stories were Country. Not pictures of land, but Country itself being shared.” This is reiterated by Carty, in his discussion of the works of Boxer Milner. In Milner’s sculpted geometries, which ebb and flow like the floodplains of his beloved Sturt River, Carty argues that “Boxer was not simply representing parts of the Country, he was re-creating them.” Stephen Gilchrist sees a similar process in the animation of Butcher Cherel’s paintings, whose intense dotting and obsessive detail enact the markers of seasonal change. In one sense, Cherel and Milner are documenting the passage of natural time; in another, they are making a visual record of ancestral presence. For Indigenous people, the visual activity of the landscape (such as the shimmer of a dried waterhole, shifts in light and color, or the blooms of Spring), are all tangible expressions of ancestral experience.20 Re-creating these visual effects is not about creating a representation of the landscape, but rather, a reenactment of the power of the Dreaming. Hence, the real concern noted by Edwina Circuitt, among Tommy Mitchell’s peers that his paintings were too powerful: that his depictions of sandstorms might “come off the canvas and wreak havoc.” As embodiments of ancestral power, paintings become an active part of imagining country, participating in this transformation process, giving them the power to literally change the world. At the height of modernism, European and American artists clamored to paint ever-larger canvases, in an attempt to absorb the viewer in an autonomous, aesthetic realm, utterly separate from the outside world. And yet, there is something profoundly more expansive in a comparatively small work by Tjumpo Tjapanangka. Tjapanangka’s work does not attempt to create its own world, but radiates outward into the world. As part of the world, it draws its power from the same energy

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patterns that drive the seasons and shape life and death on the planet. At the same time, as part of this continuum, it has the power to effect change; to reenergize this power, to affect our ways of seeing, valuing, and understanding the world. This is why these paintings are (and must be) so damn beautiful: they are intended to move you with all the planetary force of nature. Although highly political, they are affective, not didactic; they are designed to win you over with the self-evident truth of their visual power. These artists know that this is far more persuasive than a slogan or diatribe. It is also extremely conciliatory, elucidating our relation as much as our difference. The implications can be seen in the late works of Paddy Bedford, such as Ngarrmaliny—Cockatoo at Police Hole (2003), where he combines ancestral and colonial events (p. 37). The lesson of this is that if the landscape bears constant witness to the creative power of the ancestors, it also bears the burden of colonial history. Bedford’s landscape is a palimpsest in which every site registers these successive strata of memory. If, as Michiel Dolk has suggested, “the relation between place and event is open to continual transformation,” there arises in turn a space for continual improvisation, as “each painting re-creates place as a new event.”21 As a creative event upon the landscape— the same landscape from which Indigenous identity is derived— these aesthetic actions necessarily impact upon the identity of their creators. Another way to consider this is through the paintings of Prince of Wales (Midpul), in which sparse, tremulous dots are used to evoke the marks painted on the body during ceremony. Laid out across the blank ground of the canvas, each mark is like a fingerprint, recalling the haptic physicality of ceremony. In ceremony, the body of the participant is painted to mimic the ancestor. This process is not an act of hiding the body (as in Western cosmetics or make-up); it is about revealing the essence that comes from ancestral connection. The body is connected to the ancestors, who are in turn connected to country. In creating country anew via each creative event— a creative event that occurs through the cross-cultural act of

painting—these artists bring the colonizer into communion with Indigenous identity: a totality of relations that recognizes not just the presence of different ways of seeing the world, but the very necessity of such difference to our comprehension of the world. Toward the end of his life, Bedford made the provocative declaration that he had painted all of his mother’s country and all of his father’s country, and now he was “just painting.” This has typically been read as an assertion of nonobjectivity, but I think we can read it differently. In painting all of his parents’ country, he had symbolically asserted all of his authority over it. It was now, in a way, his country, part of his inalienable personal identity. The abstraction of his final paintings, such as the beautifully restrained untitled works on paper included in this exhibition, was possible for Bedford precisely because they embody country, just as he embodied country (pp. 40–43). In these paintings, it is not that reality eludes representation, but his identification with the physical and representational landscape is complete. The boundaries between self and Other, representation and reality, abstract and figurative, innovation and tradition all fade into dust. Geographic, linguistic, and artistic borders lose their power. It is not that all our differences are erased, but they no longer constitute barriers to dialogue. Before these paintings we are not transcended to a different plane, but a plane of difference: one that exists right here, right now, without boundaries.

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Notes

No Boundaries: Aboriginal Australian Contemporary Abstract Painting 1. The emergence of Aboriginal abstraction is often associated with the career of Anmatyerr artist Emily Kame Kngwarreye. However, as John Carty argues, the focus on Kngwarreye tends to obscure the fact that the rise of Aboriginal abstraction was a much broader phenomenon that occurred simultaneously across the country. See John Carty, “Rethinking Western Desert Abstraction,” in Crossing Cultures: The Owen and Wagner Collection of Contemporary Aboriginal Australian Art at the Hood Museum of Art, ed. Stephen Gilchrist (Hanover, NH: Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College, 2012), 105–6. 2. A.P. Elkin, Aboriginal Men of High Degree (Sydney: Australasian Publishing, 1945). 3. Terry Smith, Architecture of the Aftermath (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 9. 4. Nicolas Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics, trans. Simon Pleasance and Fronza Woods (Paris: Les Presses du Réel, 1998/trans. 2002), 22. 5. For a more detailed discussion of the “Pintupi Nine,” see Fred Myers, “Locating Ethnographic Practice: Romance, Reality and Politics in the Outback,” American Ethnologist 15, no. 4 (November, 1988): 609–24. 6. Ngarra, quoted in Kevin Shaw, Brrard Wangginya: And Then the Night Became Brighter 7. In Australian parlance, the term “boundary rider” is used to describe a pastoral worker who surveys the borders of a property to check the status of fences and round up stray livestock. As Australian cattle stations could extend over millions of acres, this job required many months on horseback, often in some of the most remote parts of the country.

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8. For an extended discussion, see Henry F. Skerritt, “Strange Relatives: Negotiating the Borderlines in East Kimberley Painting,” in Crossing Cultures: The Owen and Wagner Collection of Contemoporary Aboriginal Australian Art at the Hood Museum of Art, ed. Stephen Gilchrist (Hanover, NH: Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College, 2012), 92–103. 9. See for instance, Tony Fry and Anne-Marie Willis. “Aboriginal Art: Symptom or Success?,” Art in America 7, no. 7 (July 1989). 10. “Every expression of the humanities opens onto the fluctuating complexity of the world. Here poetic thought safeguards the particular, since only the totality of truly secure particulars guarantees the energy of Diversity. But in every instance this particular sets about Relation in a completely intransitive manner, relating all that is, with the finally realized totality of all possible particulars.” Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation, trans. Betsy Wing (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997), 32. 11. Ian McLean, How Aborigines Invented the Idea of Contemporary Art (Brisbane and Sydney: Institute of Modern Art and Power Publications, 2011), 43–7. 12. Nicholas Baume, “The Interpretation of Dreaming: The Australian Aboriginal Acrylic Movement,” Art & Text (Winter, 1989): 112. 13. Fred Myers, Painting Culture: The Making of An Aboriginal High Art (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002), 34. 14. Nancy Munn, Walbiri Iconography: Graphic Representation and Cultural Symbolism in a Central Australian Society (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1973), 214. 15. Fred Myers, Pintupi County, Pintupi Self : Sentiment, Place, and Politics among Western Desert Aborigines (Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1986), 18.

16. For instance, in attempting to define Conceptual art, Sol LeWitt replayed Greenberg’s separation of aesthetic and idea, defining conceptual art as art in which “the idea of concept is the most important aspect of the work” in contrast to work intended primarily for the sensation of the eye, which he termed “perceptual.” Sol LeWitt, “Paragraphs on Conceptual Art,” Artforum 5, no. 10 (June, 1967): 79–83. 17. This has been one of the most important insights of the work of Howard Morphy, one of the pioneers of Aboriginal aesthetics, whose work on Yolngu bark painting has been concerned revealing the ways in which “aesthetics can be concerned with content: with the way in which a particular “idea” is expressed.” See Howard Morphy, “From Dull to Brilliant: The Aesthetics of Spiritual Power among the Yolngu,” Man 25, no. 1 (March, 1989): 21–40. 18. Glissant, Poetics of Relation, 203. 19. This process is described in detail by Jennifer Biddle, in her book Breasts, Bodies, Canvas: Central Desert Art as Experience (Sydney: University of New South Wales Press, 2007). Although this exhibition focuses on artists from the Western Desert and Kimberley regions, a similar move into abstraction occurred almost simultaneously among the bark painters of Arnhem Land. 20. Diana Young, “Mutable Things: Colour as Material Practice in the Northwest of South Australia,” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 17, no.2 (June, 2011): 356–76. 21. Michiel Dolk, “Are We Strangers in This Place?” in Russell Storer, ed. Paddy Bedford, (Sydney: Museum of Contemporary Art, 2007), 40.

Painting Stories, Reading Country 1. The analysis of Aboriginal art as a pathway for cross-cultural exchange is elaborated by John Carty in his doctoral thesis, John Carty, “Creating Country: Abstraction, Economics and the Social Life of Style in Balgo Art” (PhD diss., Australia National University, 2011). Paddy Bedford of Jirrawun: Two-Way Street 1. Tony Stephens, “’Millionaire’ Believer in ‘Two-Way,’” Sydney Morning Herald, July 20 2007. 2. Michiel Dolk, “Are We Strangers in This Place?,” in Paddy Bedford, ed. Russell Storer (Sydney: Museum of Contemporary Art, 2006), 18. 3. Quentin Sprague, “Pushing the Line: An Unlikely Artistic Collaboration in the Kimberley,” The Monthly, (December 2013–January 2014): 33. 4. Here I follow Sir William Deane’s and Michiel Dolk’s practice of calling Bedford “PB,” because it stands, as if in translation, between his Indigenous and Western names. See Dolk, “Are We Strangers in This Place?,” 18. 5. See Sprague, “Pushing the Line: An Unlikely Artistic Collaboration in the Kimberley.” 6. Ibid, 37. 7. Marcia Langton, “Goowoomji’s World,” in Russell Storer, ed. Paddy Bedford, 56. This quote is from an unpublished manuscript from 2004, a copy of which is in Langton’s possession. 8. Frances Kofod, “Gija Glossary,” in Russell Storer, ed. Paddy Bedford, 137. 9. Walter Benjamin, “The Task of the Translator: An Introduction to the Translation of Baudelaire’s Tableaux Parisiens,” in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt (Bungay; Suffolk: Fontana; Collins, 1982), 78. 10. Ibid, 72. 11. Michael Taussig, Mimesis and Alterity: A Particular History of the Senses (New York: Routledge, 1993), xiii. 12. Walter Benjamin, “On the Mimetic Faculty,” in One Way Street and Other Writings (London: New Left Books, 1979), 160.

13. Taussig, Mimesis and Alterity: A Particular History of the Senses, 13. 14. Ibid, 50. 15. Sprague, “Pushing the Line: An Unlikely Artistic Collaboration in the Kimberley,” 33. 16. Ibid., 35. 17. Benjamin, “The Task of the Translator: An Introduction to the Translation of Baudelaire’s Tableaux Parisiens,” 72. 18. Ibid, 80–81. 19. Dolk, “Are We Strangers in This Place?,” 18. 20. Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” in Hannah Arendt, ed., Illuminations (New York: Schocken Books, 1969), 263. 21. See Langton, “Goowoomji’s World,” 53–54. 22. Peter Osborne, Anywhere or Not at All: Philosophy of Contemporary Art (London: Verso, 2013), 28. 23. Quoted in Dolk, “Are We Strangers in This Place?,” 27–28. 24. Ibid, 27. 25. Tony Oliver, Preface, in Russell Storer, ed. Paddy Bedford, 9. Jananggoo Butcher Cherel: “Am I a Good Painter or Not?” 1. The exhibition Butcher Cherel Janangoo Gooniyandi Kija was held at Birukmarri Gallery, Fremantle, July 1–29, 1992. 2. Joonany garra mi yoodila (If I am doing it right, am I a good painter or not?) (1992), synthetic polymer paint on paper, 76.0 x 56.0 cm. 3. Judith Ryan, “Images of Dislocation: Art of Fitzroy Crossing,” in Images of Power, Aboriginal Art of the Kimberley, ed. Judith Ryan (Melbourne: National Gallery of Victoria, 1993), 69. 4. Karen Dayman, “Janangoo Butcher Cherel,” in 2006 Clemenger Contemporary Art Award, ed. Kelly Gellatly and Jason Smith (Melbourne: National Gallery of Victoria, 2006), p. 11.

5. CSIRO Gooniyandi Calendar, accessed February 12, 2014. http://www.csiro.au/resources/ Gooniyandi-Seasons-Calendar 6. Fred Myers “Truth, Beauty and Pintupi Painting,” Visual Anthropology 2:2 (1989): 165. 7. Roger Benjamin, “A New Modernist Hero,” in Emily Kame Kngwarreye—Alhalkere: Paintings from Utopia, ed. Margo Neale (Brisbane: Queensland Art Gallery, 1997), 47. Midpul (Prince of Wales): “I Make the Marks” 1. Prince of Wales, artist statement. Karen Brown Gallery, Darwin, 1997. 2. Media Release, Prince of Wales Body Marks, March 18–April 19, 1997, Gallery Gabrielle Pizzi, Melbourne. 3. Gary Lee, “Larrakia Artists,” in The Oxford Companion to Aboriginal Art and Culture, Sylvia Kleinert and Margo Neale, eds. (South Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 2000), 152–54. 4. Ibid. 5. The Northern Standard, March 24, 1936 6. Hetti Perkins, Tradition Today: Indigenous Art in Australia (Sydney: Art Gallery of New South Wales, 2004), 166. 7. Lee, “Larrakia Artists.” 8. See note 2. 9. Ibid. 10. Karen Mills, “The Politics of Painting: Community, Culture, Country,” in One Sun, One Moon: Aboriginal Art in Australia, eds. Hetti Perkins and Margie West (Sydney: Art Gallery of New South Wales, 2007), 295–96. 11. Ibid. 12. Karen Mills, “The Politics of Painting: Community, Culture, Country,” 295–303. 13. Hetti Perkins, Tradition Today: Indigenous Art in Australia, 166.

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