Culture Warriors - by Stephanie Burns

Thirty artists from what is presumed to be one cultural background have been chosen by Brenda L Croft, the curator for this inaugural Australian Indigenous Art Triennial. In fact these artists come from diverse backgrounds in each of the States and Territories of Australia and from the Torres Straight Islands, and what they have in common is that they are indigenous. This exhibition purposely coincides with the fortieth anniversary of the 1967 Referendum, whereby non-Indigenous Australians voted overwhelmingly to include Indigenous Australians on the census as citizens for the first time. Culture Warriors pays tribute to a specific group of artists whose careers span the forty years since the Referendum when they were first made Australian citizens.

For nearly thirty years I have been a witness to the outstanding works that have gradually become known to the general public, created by Indigenous artists using traditional methods such as bark painting, basket weaving and the fairly recent practice, in historical terms, of traditional iconography and stories being painted on canvas. Alongside this is the more recently defined group of urban Indigenous artists who make contemporary work with contemporary media. This is the first exhibition I have seen that threads a believable connection between the work of the urban and the non-urban artists.

The works, whether painting on canvas or bark, sculpture, textiles, weaving, new media, video, photo-media or installations were all created in the last three years. Although they all have underlying political messages, it is the colour and the use of colour that unites them in my mind. I would, however, have to leave the work of Dennis Nona out of this theory. As he told me, his Islander people are primarily from a Melanesian background and cultural heritage, whereas the Indigenous art of Australia is part of the oldest continuous living culture in the world and therefore quite different from Melanesian culture.

For the curator of this exhibition, Brenda L Croft, the works chosen are political. The effects of colonization and the lack of recognition of the title to citizenship for herself, before the Referendum, and 21 of the thirty artists exhibited, are a large motivation for her curatorial choices.

The aesthetic consistencies that bind the exhibition have been touched on by other reviewers but not fully explained. Perhaps one could go so far as to explain the shared aesthetic in a spiritual sense rather than a political one. I can agree that the works of many of the urban Indigenous artists in the exhibition are purposely political, but are they primarily political or are they primarily art? The work of the non-urban artists tells stories: cultural, historical stories, the purpose of which is to disseminate an understanding of their culture to a wider audience. This may be a fight for understanding and culture, but it is not primarily political. The subject, naturally, is only one aspect of the works, and what they look like and what their physicality embodies is what they are primarily.

The aesthetic experience of beauty is understood by all people, as is the aesthetic experience of decoration; however the aesthetic experience of great art is beyond the beauty of nature, partly because it involves intelligence. This exhibition includes great works of art and the understanding and experience of viewing them is enhanced by their mutual display.

I expressed the doubt earlier that Dennis Nona’s works fit with this shared aesthetic. He is from a different cultural background. He means to revive his culture though his sculptures and linoleum block relief prints. Nona researches his ancestry through the historical artefacts kept in museums in Europe, and then returns to the Torres Straits to speak to the elders of his people to search their memories for the stories behind the carvings and inscriptions on the artefacts he has just seen. The searches revive his memory of his childhood on the island of Badu.
When I talked to Nona about the meaning of the large linoleum block relief print Yarwarr, the description he gave was of a tale that progressed from left to right – the subject was agricultural, about harvesting and ownership of the harvest. Nona was awarded the International Angel Orensanz Foundation Art Award in New York in 2004. This gave him international recognition, which is something most of the artists in the exhibition have received for their artistic endeavours.

Nona was born in 1973 on Badu (Mulgrave) Island, Western Torres Strait, Queensland. His work in print media has set the example for an artistic art form that translates the islanders historical cultural art practices easily into a more contemporary medium. Nona’s prints have become very popular with institutions and collectors. I personally don’t relate to them as great art, because the rigidity of the carved forms in the linoleum and the lack of expressive movement, or organic form in the image is lost, I feel, due to the technical process. As far as I am aware I am fairly alone in this judgement. The sculptures on the other hand are wonderfully whimsical, highly imaginative bronze figures and creatures of outstanding originality. Ubirikubiri is a large bronze sculpture in which a giant crocodile carries the figure of an ancestral being, a hunter, on its back. The hunter grasps a fishing spear; fins grow from his forearms, distend from his head, replace his ears and form a curved blade where his ankles merge. All of the physical elements of the crocodile and the hunter are believable. The carving on their bodies, partly because of its ornate nature, allows us to understand that we are witnessing a ritual. These two characters could continue to inspire us and take our breath away in future works by an artist who is original and truly reviving his cultural heritage.

Many of the sculptural works of the other artists are not highly original. They work in a format and within the restraints of a legacy of tradition. The artists are working within the constraints of the forms and structures because of tradition and because that tradition was nearly lost through lack of use. Many of the non urban Indigenous people were separated from their families and communities and sent to missions. The purpose from the missionaries’ point of view was education - the education of western knowledge.

To take a not untypical example, Arthur Koo’ekka Pambegan Jr was born in Aurukun on the Cape York Peninsula. His community consisted of just over 1200 people and was one of the largest in the area. As a boy Pambegan Jr was separated from his family and sent to the Presbyterian mission established in 1904 at Aurukun, where he lived in a boys’ dormitory. During his childhood, because of the seniority of his father in their community, occasionally he was allowed to return to his family. Chantelle Woods relates in the Culture Warriors catalogue, “Certain ‘acceptable’ forms of traditional life were encouraged by the Aurukun Mission, and from his father Pambegan Jr learnt, sometimes secretly, about his culture. In the 1960s his father taught him to carve”. Pambegan Jr is said to be the last senior master of his community and the only noted carver of his Winchanam clan sculptures. He places great importance on teaching members of his family so that another major Wik-Mungkan sculptor will emerge to continue the ancestral stories and traditions. As with all of the non urban artists, central to his concerns as an artist is the endeavour to disseminate the stories of his country and his community to the rest of the world so that they do not fade and die. At one time many of these stories were kept secret, and it is now felt across Australia amongst these people that what was secret should now be known. Pambegan Jr’s carvings, and in this exhibition for the first time works on canvas, interpret the use of ceremonial dance and body painting. Horizontal bands of red and white ochre are spaced and surrounded by charcoal or brown earth pigments representing his dark skinned body. They are striking despite their simplicity.

There are three major bark painters in the exhibition: Philip Gudthaykudthay, John Mawurndjul and Lofty Bardayal Nadjamerrek. These men are considered with such reverence by their people and by those that have worked with them that they have become advisers about their culture and ancestral history. This started for Bardayal when he came to officiate as the head of ceremony at the Lorrkon: secondary burial ritual, of two men from the Kakadu National Park area that had died. Goerg Chaloupka explained, “Before the rite could commence, it was necessary to locate the source of yamitj, the lustrous pink ochre used in this region to decorate skeletal remains. When Bardayal learnt the local people were unsuccessful in locating the source of this ochre, he told them he knew where it was quarried and led them there.”
This place was a great distance from his own country and his memory of the origin of the pink ochre led Chaloupka to wonder about his memory and knowledge of his own country. When Chaloupka came to research the rock art of the Liverpool River region he called upon Bardayal’s knowledge of oral history. “He has said the mimih and other ancestors made these early paintings, some from a time when there was little water in the country, a very long time ago (such an arid period occurred during the last Ice Age some 20000 years ago).”
Bardayal’s personal interest in the rock art caves is concentrated on the more complex figures sometimes described as x-ray art. In x-ray art the cross hatching and detail contained within the outline of the creature or spirit figure portrayed can sometimes appear to be a sliced dissection. Only the contours of the form and internally some bones and organs are described in beautiful detail, not anatomically but in a representational fashion. Bardayal is a part of this heritage and has been a witness since childhood to the painting on the walls of one particular rock art cave.
Murray Garde, who has worked with Bardayal since 1993 observes, “If you arrive at Bardayal’s camp at Kabulwarnamyo on the upper Liverpool River in the dry season, expect to see a range of people who are there to learn from him. Over the years he has worked with biologists, botanists, fire ecologists, zoologists, entomologists, linguists, anthropologists, historians, filmmakers, musicologists and museum curators. Bardayal’s knowledge is profound, and across many fields, yet it is fragile and with some urgency he and his associates have worked in recent years to ensure that this knowledge is recorded and archived for the people and management of the Arnhem Land Plateau.”

John Mawurndjul was one of the artists commissioned to make an installation for the interior of the Musée du quai Branly that was opened by Jacques Chirac in 2006. I have admired Mawurndjul’s work for many years and owned one of his older style bark paintings until recently. He has now invented with his brother, Jimmy Njminjuma, what he refers to as a new style. He says in the film that coincided with the exhibition Crossing country; the alchemy of Western Arnhem Land art at the Art Gallery of NSW in 2004, that they need to do this because they are new people. Hetti Perkins who curated the exhibition in 2004, interprets Marwurndjul’s phrase ‘we are new people’ as meaning a new generation of his people. This new style he speaks of appears to be abstract, whereas in his previous work there were depictions of fish, crocodiles, spirits, ancestral beings, kangaroos: subjects visually similar to Bardayal, but formally different. Currently Marwurndjul says, “Now I concentrate on painting important places, my lands, my djang (sacred places). I paint the power of that land.” He goes on to say that “they are very important places for us, they have meanings”. The works are now segmented horizontally on very large vertical pieces of bark that are integral to the works visual beauty. The crosshatched forms undulate across the bark adding to the visual representation of the power of the great expanse of land depicted.

These three artists have agendas as artists, teachers and elders of their people, but their work does not appear to be political. The artist in the exhibition whose work is explicitly political is Richard Bell. He doesn’t like the description “urban Aboriginal artist” and would prefer the category to be known as liberation art, as he feels this would not ghettoise Aboriginal artists from densely populated areas. Bell paints beautifully, quoting from Western artists such as Jasper Johns and Roy Lichenstein and Central Desert painters. He is brilliant with words and uses them in his paintings - he is so good with words he has caused controversies in the Australian press with the words written on his clothing. The titles of the paintings sometimes create a visual layering across the surface of a multi referenced work. Works such as Australian Art It’s an Aboriginal thing and Psalm singing which has “I Live in the Valley of the Shadow of Death” written on the lighter right hand side of the painting and “There is no Hope” in dark colours written down the dark left hand side of the painting. In a video of Bell in the exhibition he says he wants all the land to be given back to his people. He comes across as angry. Many of his paintings are angry, as are a number of the works by other urban Indigenous artists in the exhibition. None of the non urban artists’ works are angry.

All of the Australian Indigenous people have a right to be angry. Everywhere in the world colonization has had horrendous effects on the Indigenous population. Why is it that the non urban artists are not concerned to relate anger at colonization in their artwork? In the main their work is greater than the urban Indigenous artists in this exhibition, but then that has to do with curatorial choices.

I have only touched on some of the artists’ work in this exhibition. There are many more important and significant works. Doreen Reid Nakamarra, a shy woman whose works are some of the most powerful in the exhibition, does not divulge the stories behind her paintings in person or through their titles: all are Untitled. Nakamarra was recently widowed, and from talking to her I gathered that the paintings have to do with her husband and his absence. I was intrigued to know why these abstract optical paintings were about her husband not being around anymore, but she wouldn’t tell me as this was “secret business”. The undulating zigzag lines of subtly changing varying ochres over a black background appear to me to be areal views of sand hills. I admire them for their great beauty but feel slightly perplexed that I do not fully understand what is being related to me. Very often this feeling of perplexity is what leads me to investigate further, look longer and harder, do more research, follow up exhibitions and in the end will probably have me travelling to her community to seek out the artist and talk to her again.

I feel this about a lot of the work by the various artists in this exhibition. I want to know more. I want to see more. This exhibition brings together works from a diverse range of artists from varied backgrounds who make art that is invested with social, historical and political meaning. The political and social concerns of the individuals who made them do not contribute to the aesthetic unity perceived by the viewer. The intensity of colours and the playful brightness of the colour contrasts unite many of these works. The exhibition is so visually stimulating that it could and probably will be studied for years..

Culture Warriors, National Indigenous Art Triennial, National Gallery of Australia p.38

p.26

p.28

p.17 From a conversation with John Mawurndjul and Apolline Kohen, 19 Mar 2007

National Gallery of Australia, Canberra ACT, 12 October 2007 to 10 February 2008

Queensland Art Gallery, Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane QLD, March – May 2009 (TBC)