Jean Baptiste Apuatimi and Maria Josette Orsto

According to legend, the Jilamara or Tiwi body paint designs date back to the time of the spirit ancestors. They were created for the very first Pukamani ceremony, performed to mark the death of the creation being Purukupali. This ceremony was performed to ensure that the Tiwi would not die, but be reincarnated, and marked the end of the Tiwi creation period. Although ostensibly a mortuary ritual, the Pukamani is as much about regeneration and renewal, as it is about death. The Tiwi are instructed to take great care with the traditions of the Jilamara, but are also encouraged to use it to celebrate the power of creativity. In many ways, this dichotomy is the key to understanding both the power of Tiwi art and the genius of Jean Baptiste Apuatimi.

The gravitas of Tiwi art first came to widespread attention in the late 1950s, with the collection of 17 magnificent Pukamani poles by Tony Tuckson for the Art Gallery of New South Wales. In the last decade, however, it has been Jean Baptiste Apuatimi who come to the fore as one of the tradition’s finest contemporary proponents and innovators. Born around 1940 at Pirlangimpi on Melville Island, she has forged forward with an unsurpassed skill for bold gesture, texture and colour; all signs of a confident artistry that derives from a lifetime of learning, watching the Jilamara used in ceremony and in the artwork of her late husband Declan Apuatimi.

This confidence allows Jean to balance formal investigation with a profound respect for cultural continuity. At the Tiwi Design art centre on Nguiu (Bathurst Island), Jean works surrounded by younger artists: her daughter Maria Josette Orsto and relatives Ita Tipungwuti, Margaret Renee Kerinauia and Roslyn Ortso. Sitting with Jean, these young women learn not just pwanga amintiya marlipinyini (dots and lines), but also the importance of originality; the expression of personality within these designs. Anyone who has ever witnessed the diminutive power of Jean performing her Jarrangini (Buffalo) dance, knows that she has a personality with the force of nature.

But like the Jarrangini dance, Jean’s work is about balance and tension. The essence of her practice might be seen in one of her most distinctive designs; Jikapayinga. Depicted as an irregular grid of squares, Jikapayinga refers to a female crocodile. It is a design that balances unity and individuality; each square is a unique object, but the power of the design comes from their interaction – the rhythmic ebb and flow as each square relates to its neighbour in part of a larger, more important narrative. In doing so, Jikapayinga creates a visual metaphor for the role of the individual within a greater tradition. And this is, indeed the key to Jean’s paintings. Jean Baptiste Apuatimi is a true master working in an ancient mode; she is an singular artist whose work gains its power by summoning up all the spirits of her ancestors, influences and progenitors. In doing so, she creates the truly individual vision of a world-class artist.

Kirrily Hammond: Swoon

It is a crisp summer evening in Alpine Victoria. Across the vista, the dusk clouds roll in, changing the light from a gentle mauve into a rich dark blue. Soon nightfall will turn the clouds into a shapeless darkness upon the horizon, but for now each one is trimmed with a brilliant glow, as though they have been delicately edged by a heavenly seamstress. For one passing moment the world is still.

As I recall this scene, I am immediately struck by the dull inadequacy of language to describe such majesty. How could any representation, be it literary or painterly, capture the profound, haptic experience of being in nature? How could a painting evoke the encompassing awe that causes one to swoon in the face of the sublime?

Over the past fifteen years, Kirrily Hammond has explored many different landscapes in her paintings, prints and drawings. Her early works reveled in a fantasy world of the imagination, in which anamorphic trees jostled with ethereal spirits and circus ghouls. More recently, however, she has found her inspiration in the real world, taking the landscapes of Gippsland, Mount Buller and Japan as her subject. In doing so, she has pushed away from the enclosed, personal world of the subconscious, towards a much more universal experience. For as much as we have shared dreams and fantasies, the surrealist vision is a highly personalised one. In her most recent landscapes, Hammond has gravitated towards intentionally unspecific or generic settings. Her paintings, she stresses, “are not about the landscape” and she intentionally seeks scenes that are geographically unrecognisable. In Hammond’s paintings, the landscape is clouded with the hazy light of dusk or dawn, and seems to exist as little more than a prop for her experiments in light and texture. As such, they take on the uncanny possibility that they could be anywhere. Although impossible to pin down their precise location, each one has a striking sense of familiarity, as though it is a place that one has visited in the distant past.

Concurrent with this thematic development, Hammond has settled into a small format that perfectly suits her cause. Each work exists as an exquisitely sealed hermetic portal onto a distant, but disquietingly familiar world. Looking at her paintings of clouds, such as Flight JQ3 2009, it is impossible not to be reminded of the tiny cabin windows of commercial airliners, while in her Gippsland Twilight series, the format evokes the view from a speeding car window, or perhaps that of a blurry Polaroid snap-shot.

In these paintings, Hammond is asking how we frame the sublime. Not simply how we represent the majesty of nature, but also how we recall it, how we package it, and how we consume it. More pertinently, they question how we overlook this majesty in our everyday lives. In the safe, comfortable space of the aeroplane or automobile, how often do we fail to notice the sublime as we speed on by? Margaret Morse has termed this the ‘precondition of distraction.’ The car interior becomes a de-realised ‘non-space’ in which the traveller is insulated from the outside world, achieving what Morse calls a ‘mobile privatisation’ that displaces us from our surroundings. A similar sense of ‘distraction’ might be conjured by the image of the tourist, unable to quantify any experiences not captured through the prism of their camera.

This is the challenge set by Hammond’s paintings, prints and drawings. For they are not about replicating the sublime, or even using paint to imitate nature in order to create a virtual swoon. Rather, Hammond’s vision is driven by a much more profound romanticism. As her paintings have become less reliant upon fantasy, they have insistently drawn attention to the beauty inherent in the world around us. Rather than being portals to an imaginary world, they point to a world just outside our windows; rather than a mystery beyond reality, these works point to the mystery within reality. It is this sentiment that causes one’s heart to swoon before Hammond’s paintings. As Sasha Grishin notes, “In Hammond’s depiction of the sublime, we do not experience the quality of terror and awe, but a sense of glowing inner radiance.” This is not the classical sense of the sublime, for there is no fear in this world. The mystery of Hammond’s work comes from seeing the familiar anew; realising beauty where before there was only the ordinary; finding majesty in the mundane; grandeur in the generic; the sublime in our everyday lives. Hammond challenges us to be constantly aware of the wonder and beauty that surrounds us, and that through this mystery we might learn to swoon again.

Kirrily Hammond: Swoon runs from 22 September - 10 October 2009 at Chapman & Bailey Gallery, 350 Johnston Street, Abbotsford, Victoria

Great Expectations: A Personal Reflection on the music of Gareth Skinner

I remember a warm summer morning in January 2009, sitting with Gareth Skinner on the balcony of Sydney hotel. We had been woken early by group of drunken teens frolicking in the hotel’s swimming pool. Nursing a mind-crushing hangover, I remember calling Skinner a cynic. Without a beat, he replied, ‘A cynic is what an optimist calls a realist.” Listening to Looking for Vertical, Skinner’s latest cello-driven opus, it might be easy to focus on the seemingly misanthropic cynicism of songs like “Your Pointless Life”, “Amateur Hour” or “There is No Light”. But this would be to miss the point. For Skinner isn’t a cynic, nor is he an optimist, or even a realist. Indeed, Looking for Vertical is far too thoughtful, complex and ultimately human body of work to fit neatly into such narrow categories.

At the epigraph of Confederacy of Dunces (one of Skinner’s favourite novels), John Kennedy Toole quotes Jonathan Swift: “When a true genius appears in the world, you may know him by this sign, that the dunces are all in confederacy against him.” Looking for Vertical is the restless work of an artist committed to the refutation of mediocrity. Like Ignatius J. Reilly, the anti-hero of Toole’s novel, Skinner’s work sits outside the mainstream: it is an indefinable blend of rock, pop, classical and art noise, driven with a baroque grandeur by Skinner’s inimitable cello playing. Unlike Reilly, however, there is a rigour and virtuosity to Skinner’s rejection of the mundane, ordinary and mediocre. A better comparison might be to the social criticism of artists like John Brack. For like Brack, Skinner’s work places expectations upon the listener and upon the very world around them. Their work presents a call to arms against stupidity, against the banal and against the vacuous. In doing so, they place expectations upon society – expectations that things could be better, smarter, more thoughtful and ultimately more human.

As a result, Looking for Vertical is an album filled with unexpected surprises. When he wishes, Skinner can conduct a world of sweetness and light, where sweeping cellos swoon in a feast of intertwining melodies [‘Intro’, ‘Interlude’, ‘Epitaph’]. At other points, Skinner’s cello takes on a tortured metallic squeal [There is No Light], or creates a freight-train rumble of driving rhythms [‘Looking for Vertical’]. In the world of Looking for Vertical, everything is in its right place, unless it fits better elsewhere, when it is inverted, distorted, ripped apart, twisted and torn beyond recognition. But this is not ‘quirkiness’ for its own sake, and Skinner’s work never devolves into self-indulgent zany-ness. Rather, Skinner’s experimentation appears as a natural extension of his restless and demanding ethos.

Virtuosic without recourse to flashiness, Looking for Vertical is brimming with the clear joy of playing – the pleasure taken in experimentation and in pushing his songs, arrangements and performace to their limits. The listening experience is, as a result, infectiously enjoyable. Songs like ‘Looking for Vertical’ and ‘More than What’ bounce joyfully along with a rhythmic insistency as primordial as any rock band, whilst driven by Skinner’s wild cello playing, which has no peer in Australia or abroad. No other string player can match both the artfulness of Skinner’s intensity, with his range and virtuosity. But it is perhaps, Skinner’s ability to transcend this virtuosity that makes Looking for Vertical such an exciting record to listen to. As Skinner sings in the song of the same name, “I don’t want your pointless life’. Looking for Vertical shows an artist who wants something much more – something exceptional. Fortunately, Skinner isn’t too cynical to think that it is something that we might all enjoy.

Looking for Vertical is available now 2009 through Rubber Records.

Ancestral Power and the Aesthetic

Below is an extended version of a piece that was published in Crikey this week.

Ancestral Power and the Aesthetic
Ian Potter Museum of Art, University of Melbourne

Last Wednesday, amidst relatively little fanfare, the Ian Potter Museum at the University of Melbourne launched Ancestral Power and the Aesthetic: the first ever exhibition of barks paintings from the Donald Thomson Collection. Thomson was a pioneering anthropologist, who amassed over 4500 objects during his expeditions into Australia’s north in the 1930s and 1940s. At the opening of the exhibition, a former trustee of the National Gallery of Victoria was overheard to say that perhaps Ancestral Power should have been the NGV’s ‘Winter Masterpieces’ exhibition. Certainly, in my experience, I have never seen anything quite like the twenty bark paintings on display. Put simply, they are some of the finest examples of Australian Indigenous art in existence. The fact that they have never been exhibited before, and remain relatively unheralded and unknown is quite staggering.

If the works in Ancestral Power and the Aesthetic were not so momentous, so profoundly moving and so visually dynamic, it would be easy for them to be overshadowed by the story of their creation and collection. It is Thomson’s name that echoes through the exhibition, particularly as several of the major works are unattributed. Nor are Thomson’s achievements without cause for celebration. A maverick young anthropologist, he entered Arnhem Land at a bloody crossroads in the Territory’s history. The Caledon Bay Crisis had seen the local Yolngu people clash with Japanese poachers, in a series of violent episodes that escalated to include attacks upon the local constabulary. In Canberra, there were fears of an Indigenous uprising in the North, and Thomson’s mission was intended as much as conciliatory and anthropological.

Arriving in central Arnhem Land in 1935, Thomson immersed himself in Yolngu culture, quickly befriending the important elder and Yolngu statesman Wonggu. Wonggu would later paint two monumental barks for Thomson, which remain some of the jewels in the collection, and form the centrepoint of Ancestral Power.

Thomson’s association with men like Wonggu, enabled him to amass one of the finest collections of Indigenous treasures in the world. Amongst literally thousands of objects, he amassed a body of around 70 bark paintings, of whose quality is unsurpassed in any other collection. Following his death in 1970, Thomson’s widow Dorita bequeathed the collection to the University of Melbourne; a bequest that, according to Mrs Thomson, was considered by the University to be “a bit of a nuisance.” The collection eventually found a home at the Melbourne Museum, where it remains of permanent loan.

Ancestral Power and the Aesthetic brings together 20 masterpieces from the Thomson collection. They have been carefully selected by Melbourne Museum curator Lindy Allen to represent the differing regional, clan and aesthetic varieties within the collection. Allen’s passion has been one of the driving forces in the preservation, documentation and exhibition of the Thomson collection.

When Allen arrived at the Museum in 1989, the Thomson collection was sadly neglected, in poor storage and with limited documentation. It took nearly five years before every item in the collection was properly photographed and catalogued. Armed with a hefty folder of photographic reproductions, in 1994 Allen began the complicated process of community consultation and fieldwork. At first, her folders were met with caution – for the local Yolngu were unaware of what dangerous or powerful images their predecessors may have depicted. But over time, Allen built trust. Every evening, she would have a knock on the door, and be greeted by a different Yolngu family asking to borrow the folder. Eventually, she began to assemble information on each work, and more importantly, consent to exhibit these prized pieces.

According to Allen, “It has taken until now for us to have the confidence that every one of these works could be shown.” Whilst she laments certain pieces that could not be exhibited due to an inability to locate the relevant family member, it is this deep integrity and respect that has endeared Allen to the communities in which she works, in much the same way as Thomson before her. Although it is difficult to assess, one suspects that this mutual respect has given the Yolngu confidence in Allen’s intentions, and in turn allowed her certain levels of accommodation. The curator notes, “It is often not about what can or cannot be shown, but about what can be said about the objects. It is about negotiating the grounds for engagement.”

In a broad sense, engagement is at the core of Ancestral Power. By the 1930s, the Yolgnu elders were faced with the difficult realisation that their survival depended upon defending their culture against the encroaching tide of modernity. According to Allen, the elders “had an understanding that they must engage with the outside world. They were thinking about how to tell the outside world about who they were; that this was their country. The works became like deeds to their land.”

The paintings produced for Thomson by Wonggu and the other elders were created to show the complexity, value and relevance of Yolngu culture. This lends them an urgent intensity, but at the same time, the barks included in Ancestral Power are works of meticulous grace and refined elegance. Each bark has been fastidiously prepared; perfectly cured and flattened, so that after seventy years they have not curled nor cracked: faults that plague bark paintings that have been hastily prepared for the contemporary commercial market.

But perhaps the most remarkable aspect of these bark paintings is that they represent the very genesis of two-dimensional painting in Yolngu culture. For whilst the Yolngu had long painted their sacred clan designs (or minytji) on the body and ceremonial objects, the barks collected by Thomson were the first time when these designs had been removed from their ceremonial ‘use’ context and applied for a purely aesthetic purpose.

This transferral required a considerable aesthetic inventiveness, for although the Yolngu had a wealth of traditional designs, these required modification to the new media. New motifs were introduced, particularly those figurative devices necessary for the depiction of grand narratives. This is particularly evident in the monumental depiction of the Djan’kawu Sisters Story by Mawunpuy Mununggurr, which is one of the highlights of the exhibition and an indisputable masterpiece of Australian painting. In attempting to depict the Djan’kawu Sister in her half-ancestral, half-Yolngu form, Mawunpuy’s work shows the dawn of Yolngu figurative painting and the introduction of several important techniques – such as the use of footprints to indicate land travel, and the use of contrasting sections of cross hatching and block colours in his figures. These techniques continue to reverberate through the lively contemporary schools of Yolngu painting at Yirrkala, Milingimbi and Ramingining.

The forms, content and images that emerge in these works define the history of Yolngu painting. With the benefit of retrospect, these early masterpieces reveal an evolving history, whose sparkle illuminates not only the past, but also the present and the future. But beyond their art historical or anthropological significance, the works included in Ancestral Power and the Aesthetic are visually astounding. Allen’s entire body lights up when she speaks of the ‘shine’ or bir’yun of these barks. According to Allen, this ‘brilliance’ was “intended to capture the essence of the wangarr [ancestors] an harness its strength and power or marr.” These are paintings that speak of a distant time, in an ancient language; and yet, by their brilliance they seek to transcend time: to be simultaneously ancient and modern. It is perhaps this reason, that despite their age, these works bristle with an urgency and power that is as striking for its formal and conceptual relevance as for the ancient cosmology which it evokes.

Ancestral Power and the Aesthetic: Arnhem Land Painting and Objects from the Donald Thomson Collection
Ian Potter Museum of Art, University of Melbourne
2 June – 23 August 2009

Patrick Kunoth Pwerle

Patrick Kunoth Pwerle was born in 1981 at Artekerre in the remote eastern desert region of Utopia. Since commencing his art practice in 2007, Kunoth Pwerle’s oeuvre has been singularly devoted to the subject of birds. A wild aviary has sprung from his artistic imagination. Whether eagle, owl, emu or hawk, each is created unique, coloured with its own eccentric disposition. But beyond revelling in natural variety, Patrick Kunoth Pwerle’s dedication to avian form reveals an intuitively modernist project of repetition and refinement in which the artist explores the reductive potential of both the sculptural medium and his favoured motif.

Kunoth Pwerle is not the first sculptor to become obsessed with the figure of the bird. Almost a century earlier, the image of the bird in flight launched Constantin Brâncuşi on a forty-year journey of artistic refinement. Brâncuşi saw his art practice as an evolutionary search for pure form, never abandoning the natural world, but reducing it to its most basic elements in order to lay bare the underlying nature of the image. Comparing the sculptures of Brâncuşi and Kunoth Pwerle, the attraction of the streamlined avian form becomes readily apparent. For both artists, it is a form that is easily suggested using only a small number of oblique visual cues (the curve of the body for instance, or the point of the beak).

Over his short career, Kunoth Pwerle has developed a skilful sculptural shorthand for depicting birds, which often relies on no more than a few brief incisions to indicate wings, tails or beaks. Unlike Brâncuşi, who saw the reductive process as a means of capturing the essence of the image, in Kunoth Pwerle’s work this process is used in deference to the unaltered natural medium. Carved from the soft wood of the bean tree (erythrina vespertilio), it is the medium (rather than the image) that dictates form, allowing the natural object to express itself in a totemic intensity. Not only does this enable Kunoth Pwerle to exploit a boundless, naturally occurring variety of forms; more importantly, it offers a distinctly Indigenous metaphor for the connectedness of all things. The figure and the form are united, not in opposition, but in a holistic union, with obvious parallels to the poetic mythos of the Dreaming. The birds are literally returned to the branches as the figure returns to the form; the object to the subject; the aesthetic to the natural order; and so on. Kunoth Pwerle’s project takes on an evolutionary aesthetic logic that provides a striking metaphor for the intersection of modern art and Indigenous cosmology; something that we might begin to see as a uniquely Indigenous modernism.

Patrick Kunoth Pwerle began making art in 2007 under the influence and encouragement of his parents Dinni Kunoth Kemarre and Josie Kunoth Petyarre. Since 2005, Josie and Dinni have spearheaded a revival in the Utopian sculptural tradition that first emerged in the late 1980s under the stewardship of art co-ordinator Rodney Gooch. Since 2007, Dinni and Josie have risen to prominence as consummate observers and compulsive chroniclers. In their art, the minutiae of everyday life becomes a worthy subject for artistic exaltation, demonstrating an artistic vision unencumbered by restrictive binary notions of ‘traditional’ and ‘contemporary.’ Art has always been a part of the Indigenous cultural backdrop, connecting Indigenous people to the world around them and the immutable Dreaming. The art of Dinni and Josie showed just how adaptive this cosmology could be.

Kunoth Pwerle’s earliest works show a clear debt to his parents’ observational style. And yet, as Kunoth Pwerle gained confidence as an artist, he quickly abandoned their astute attention to detail in favour of a plastic freedom. As his parents’ work became more detailed and naturalistic, Kunoth Pwerle’s sculptures became more abstract, dispensing with all unnecessary representational elements.

Compounding this move towards a sculptural abstraction, Kunoth Pwerle’s works have more recently developed a painterly dimension that further distances any suggestion of naturalism. Drawing upon the broad gestural brushstrokes and overlapping dot-work that has characterised Utopian painting, Kunoth Pwerle’s use of paint often seems less about defining the form, than highlighting its very objecthood. At times, Kunoth Pwerle’s paintwork seems to allude to the ceremonial body painting tradition, further highlighting the totemic nature of the object. At other times it seems to almost camouflage the form, as though the sculptural object was no more than a sounding board for a painterly experiment. And yet, whilst Kunoth Pwerle’s sculptures push referentiality to its very limits, they maintain a confidence in their connectedness to the landscape, defiantly foregrounding the link between his modernist project and his Anmatyerre homelands.

Patrick Kunoth Pwerle was born at the dawn of the Utopia art movement. If artwork has been one of the principle fields upon which Indigenous Australians have engaged with the wider world – through which they have bridged the tribal and the modern and showed their traditions to be both contemporary and relevant – then Patrick Kunoth Pwerle has grown up at the frontier of this exquisite intersection of Indigenous cosmology and modernity. His work offers us a way to look beyond these rigid binary positions and see the very possibilities of a Utopian modernism.