Nicolas Rothwell article on 'Painting the Song' in The Australian [29.10.2009]
Nicolas Rothwell has written on the McCulloch & McCulloch book 'Painting the Song: Kaltjiti Artists of the Sand Dune Country', by Diana James & Kaltjiti Arts in today's Australian newspaper.
Nicolas Rothwell | October 29, 2009 Article from: The Australian
WHEN painting began in the small Pitjantjatjara community of Irrunytju in Western Australia in mid-2001, there was a degree of surprise mixed in with the excitement as the flow of jewel-like works began.
Painting? In that region of the western desert so long resistant to the depiction of traditional forms and symbols in art for outside eyes?
Since then, the painting movement has spread at speed through the little communities of the Pitjantjatjara lands, which cluster around the border point where the Northern Territory, South Australia and Western Australia meet.
New art centres have been set up in the main settlements and even in little fringing outstations, while old craft workshops have been given fresh support and are nurturing the latest stars of the Aboriginal art world.
In the space of a few years, a painting school quite unfamiliar to collectors has come to prominence. Today the area, known in administrative parlance as the Anangu Pitjantjatjara Yankunyjatjara or, more easily, APY lands, is widely viewed as the last frontier of traditional desert art.
This has been a startling ascent. It was only in late 2004 that the first significant showing of APY paintings went up in a state gallery, when the National Gallery of Victoria unveiled its Colour Power exhibition, marked out by vivid canvases from Irrunytju. Today, specialist Aboriginal art galleries such as Melbourne's Alcaston and Gabrielle Pizzi, Perth's Randell Lane or Broome's Short Street hold regular exhibitions of APY work. A lyrical show of new paintings from Tjala Arts of Amata community is on view this month at Sydney's Aboriginal and Pacific Art.
There is an APY look, a stylistic template shared by many of the region's artists; there are established masters and emerging talents; there is, above all, a wide, serious engagement by APY men and women in the task of painting their culture and offering the outside world a picture of themselves.
This evolution has been so rapid the underlying history of its early days is still being written. The first detailed account of the region's art, Painting the Song, by Diana James, a former co-ordinator of Kaltjiti Arts at the community of Fregon, advances a striking theory about desert painting as well as giving some initial pointers to a complex tale. James, fluent in western desert language, reaches deep into the thought-world of her artist friends and brings out the sources of contemporary art-making in the APY lands.
Stereotypes are broken in her narrative; myths fall. The general assumption is that the symbols and icons of desert art were first shown to Westerners at the desert settlement of Papunya in 1971, when teacher Geoff Bardon launched the painting movement. In fact, desert men and women had made detailed symbolic drawings for anthropologist Charles Mountford three decades earlier, at Ernabella mission in the heart of the APY lands. An art studio was set up in Ernabella more than a half century ago and a tradition of craftwork - carvings, weavings, ceramics - began. The Ernabella designs of those days featured a distinctive flowing pattern, the anapala walka, which developed from the initial Mountford drawings.
But painting of sacred symbols for public view was strictly forbidden: men's law was strong there; prohibitions on the display of its imagery were fiercely enforced. Once it became known by the senior men in the APY lands that their ceremonial partners at Papunya were painting their traditional icons for sale, a furious dispute broke out.
Pitjantjatjara men even launched an attack on an early exhibition of Papunya boards held in Alice Springs.
The subsequent story of art in the desert can be read as the development of strategies for masking and concealing sacred designs, and finding appropriate channels for artistic energy. This was a quest pursued on both sides of the cultural divide. The Aboriginal Arts Board in the mid-1970s recommended that the APY lands become the centre for wooden artefact making, while Papunya was to serve as the capital of acrylic painting. And so it went. In the years that followed, APY men specialised in wood carvings; the women at Ernabella began a batik-making tradition.
Only after lengthy debate, and only after art centres had been set up across the surrounding desert in Warburton and in the communities around Alice Springs, did APY artists take up painting in concerted fashion: at Irrunytju, but also in swift succession at Amata and at
the existing studios of Ernabella and Kaltjiti.
There was an abrupt outpouring of majestic art. Painting the Song approaches this tale in subtle ways, introducing the artists of Kaltjiti and their lives, and tracing the themes of their work through a set of journeys across their traditional country. Artists who have been no more than names in catalogues emerge as sharply drawn characters, their beliefs and biographies sketched in.
There's Iwana Ken, from Walytjitjata homeland, a traditional doctor, keen traveller and tireless reteller of old story-cycles; there's Robin Kankapankatja, the senior owner of Walalkara, who began painting only in 2004 and constantly depicts his own country; and, most striking of all, there's Tali-Tali Pompey, a creator of stark, abstract-seeming images, a painter of force who marries line and colour to rhythmic effect.
These are only the best known among the senior generation of the Kaltjiti artists who figure prominently in the lushly illustrated pages of Painting the Song. But a similar book could be filled with rich landscape tales and life sketches from each one of the art centres of the APY lands. Artists such as the two senior men from Amata, Tiger Palpatja and Hector Burton, or Angkaliya Curtis, the wildlife painter from Tjungu Palya, work in such distinctive style their trajectories call out for biographic interpretation.
What gives this regional tradition its potency? Mark Walker, whose Randell Lane gallery champions western desert work, is in no doubt: "The thing that makes art from the APY lands special is that the artists are so confident in what they do, and that comes from their unbroken link to country. They're so strong and when you look at their work every brushstroke is unhesitating, put down for a reason."
Walker also sees a quality of urgency about the work made in the lands, an urgency that transmits itself to collectors, for this is very much a school of painting sustained by keen-eyed private buyers rather than by public galleries. Rough, intense, life-filled, stripped-down, the APY canvases are far from the cool, minimalist aesthetic that holds sway in most state collections of desert art.
There is a direct reason for this. In her account, James explores the fundamentals of APY painting, not just the stories and world view behind it but the linking of all the senses that lies at the heart of desert identity.
"Painting the song of the land is only possible for people who hear music when they see country," she says.
The conclusion from this is natural: desert artists are synaesthetics. For them, as, famously, for modernist Wassily Kandinsky, paintings and colours evoke sound. By chance, art historian Roger Benjamin, in his recent catalogue of the Wilkerson collection of early Papunya boards, Icons of the Desert, came close to this idea himself, in suggesting that some of those works evoked an aural response in him.
James goes further: "Hearing the song produces mental visual images of country." Tones are absorbed through all the senses: touched, heard, felt, seen. The same thought seemed obvious to musicologist Catherine Ellis, who felt Aboriginal song had an iridescent quality, with different colours brought to the foreground of the listening imagination by the slightest variations of tone in the singer's voice.
All this amounts to a new account of desert art's deep underpinnings: an intriguing account. The sense of difference and depth that so many Western viewers feel when confronted by desert paintings may well stem from an awareness of this further register: sound, colour and pattern linked in tandem.
Too often the notion of the songline in desert painting becomes just a loose, hackneyed cliche. But old desert artists do sing as they paint, and stroke and touch their canvases; they sing as they move through country; the paintings are frozen images of a world that beats with the pulse of vivid life.
Colour is what sets apart the paintings of the past decade from the APY realm, and that realm is in truth a landscape of colour: the brick-red of the rocks at dawn, the bright green of desert oaks in storm season, the grey of tree trunks burned to ash by fire. The late-dawning acrylic era brought those blazing hues to canvas. It is hard not to trace the strong appeal, and immediate success, of the art of the APY lands to this distinctive feature, this "colour rhythm".
As is well known, many of the first paintings made at Papunya were also painted in an exorbitant palette, before the artists opted for a reduced set of ochre tones, and those subdued shades form the basis for high-end, establishment paintings from Papunya Tula artists to this day.
It is as if two tendencies are at war in the various schools and art centres of the desert: one rich and vibrant, as artists seek to capture their aural understanding of the landscape; one sombre and understated, evoking the solemn, cyclic splendour of ceremony and ritual in reduplicated forms.
Such are the mysteries that lurk in the visual maelstroms of APY art now. When the relationship between colour and sound and pattern is held in mind, the paintings from the region seem to display a transparent logic. Thus Pompey's famous Anumara Piti (Caterpillar Dreaming) from the Art Gallery of South Australia becomes a commentary on movement and the passing of time, rather than a mere assemblage of pleasing, looped patterns. And the sense of sound, and silences, in the work from the lands also lends it form and shape. Mark Walker of Randell Lane gallery, who has lived very closely with this work during the past near decade, recalls taking delivery of a particularly haunting canvas, a set of squares, in shades of pink, by Ginger Wilkilyiri from Nyapari. How subtle it was in its rhythms, how elusive in its patterned brushstrokes! What could it possibly depict? Walker was surprised when he got the documentation: the painting showed the sound of moonlight, moonlight hitting the ground by night. Once more, colour, rhythm, overarching tone.
For the first few years after the explosion of art-making in the APY lands, there was a tendency among collectors and connoisseurs to admire the surface of the paintings, while reserving a certain scepticism about their air of rapidity: their brilliant sketchiness. But as the new school has established itself and the painters have refined and entrenched their techniques, the colours and their combinings have only gained in force. It has become more and more apparent that the pulse and sweep of the paintings are what bring the viewers in, and bring them nearer contact with the inner reaches of the traditional world.
There was a sense, too, that once the tide of commercial enthusiasm began sweeping through the APY lands, the days of strong art would be numbered. But for those who look with all their senses, the renaissance there is in full swing and opens up fresh roads into the landscape. It is not just a new school of painting that is on offer in the deep desert: it is new ways for the mind and heart to roam.
Tjala Arts, New Work, is at Aboriginal and Pacific Art, Danks Street, Sydney, until November 7. Painting the Song, by Diana James, is published by McCulloch and McCulloch, $59.95.
