ART : Aboriginal Abstracts That ‘Talk’

Michael Nelson Tjakamarra sits back to survey his canvas. “This painting is called ‘Possum Dreaming,’ ” he says. “It’s about a possum traveling north with his mother to a place called Wantababi. They went there and stayed in that place. This is a big canvas, the biggest I’ve done.”

The canvas stretches half the length of the ramshackle corrugated iron shed where he’s working. The artwork is more than 30 feet long, a black carpet highlighted with dots, circles and wavy lines--yellow, burnt umber, pink, coral, white, blue, ocher.

“We’ve got to show the world what we’re doing, (we) aboriginal people in Australia,” says Nelson (Tjakamarra is his clan or “skin name”). “Same like white people show videos and books. We’ve got to share it.”

Although the paintings are made to be sold, the bright pointillistic works of Nelson and other aboriginal artists have another special significance. They represent a beleaguered people’s attempt to regenerate a feeling of pride and interest in the roots and “law” of a nomadic civilization that stretches back thousands of years.

The fact that there is money to be made doing it because collectors from around the world are snatching up the “affordable” art is simply an unexpected bonus. One gets the impression that if Nelson didn’t have a buyer for his paintings, he would still paint with the same intensity.

All morning he has been working on “Possum Dreaming.” He sits on top of the stretched canvas and painstakingly adds colored dots to the black background. His wife, Marjorie, also sits on the concrete floor beside him and hands him brushes and paints mixed in battered cans.

It’ll take another week for Nelson to complete the painting, which will then be shipped to the consignee--the Sydney Opera House.

Squatting here in the heat of central Australia, brushing away flies and the ever-present dust, a visitor finds it hard to connect Nelson’s rustic work space in Papunya with the glitter and glass of the opera house. The modernistic breezy beauty and urban harbor-side splendor of the painting’s eventual home is a massive jump in distance, climate and culture, one that increasingly is being bridged by artists such as Nelson and his fellow aboriginal artists in the desert around Papunya.

Of course, art knows no boundaries. Even the director of the National Gallery in the Australian capital of Canberra has noted that the work being produced in and around Papunya represents “simply the finest abstract paintings that have been produced in Australia to date.”

That’s an impressive accolade for an art movement that is barely 15 years old. But the mother lode of aboriginal culture that Nelson and others are mining goes substantially further back--40,000 years at least, according to some.

A Desolate Land

The small aboriginal town of Papunya, 150 miles northwest of Alice Springs, is surrounded by three deserts--the Simpson to the east, the Tanami to the north and the Gibson to the west. To the eye of a newcomer it is desolate land, dotted with desert oak, whitewood, wattle shrubs, yellow flowering witchetty bushes and the ubiquitous spinfex grass. Life on the reserve is not easy, similar to the most squalid conditions found on American Indian reservations: Many of the aboriginal inhabitants live in “humpies,” rough dirt-floor shelters with roofs made of corrugated iron, canvas or bush.

There is one store, a clinic, an elementary school and one radio-telephone linking Papunya to the outside world. If one were to pick a site from which a major art movement were to spring, few would pick this windblown settlement on the edge of nowhere.

Papunya, established in 1960 by the Australian government, is an Aboriginally controlled reserve within the Haasts Bluff Land trust and close to important dreamtime sites. The reserve was supposed to foster “assimilation” in a centralized location and encourage Aboriginals to abandon traditional nomadic ways. It was a humanitarian approach that failed to take into account the intricate politics and alliances that had developed among tribes over thousands of years. Three major local tribes, the Pintubi, the Warlpari, and the Aranda were pushed into close proximity. Fighting among these tribes--many of whom were still living a traditional bush life style a few decades earlier--and alcohol abuse gave the place a bad reputation among both Aboriginals and whites.

Walking around the dusty camp town, founded in 1960, observers find that just about everyone paints--the old woman across the road, slowly chopping up vegetables over an open fire for the family’s dinner, a pair of grandmothers minding their offspring at the clinic, two brothers living in a rustic camp outside of town on the edge of the bush, a middle-aged man down the road struggling with the innards of his broken-down truck. Walking down one of the dirt tracks that snake out of town to outstations, one sees an old woman hunched over a canvas anchored in the dirt by stones. Tins of acrylic paint and well-worn bushes are scattered around her while in the branches of a bush over her head are two rolled up canvases.

In the early evening at Five Mile Camp outside Papunya, the few lights of the town are invisible and the blistering display of the Milky Way is just starting to swirl overhead. Dinner is being prepared over an open fire while Paddy Carroll Tjungurrayi leans up against an old battered truck, smokes a cigarette and watches his brother, Two Bob, put final touches on a painting stretched out on the sand. A trio of bush dogs come by to have an obligatory sniff at the visitors.

“I’ve been learning him,” Paddy says, gesturing at Two Bob. “He’s the young one. I’ve been laying down the story. He’s got them all in his memory now.”

Two Bob adds a few last dots, then sits back, satisfied with the riotous display of purple, yellow, black and white.

Paddy leans down to explain the painting: “See that big rock there? The European name is Mount West. This here is bush tucker, something like a potato. This here is also bush tucker, like a little plum.”

It’s full night now, and the incessant swarms of flies have all settled down into the dust. There are maybe two dozen people living out here at Five Mile Camp. Several derelict autos sit gutted and rusting nearby, playhouses for the children.

“This is like sand painting,” continues Paddy. “Old days, the people come and make a sand painting, and we give them a kangaroo. We never had money then. Our old men, like our fathers, they’d be learning us the sand painting. That’s why we carry on the painting.”

Collectors Grab Art

All this artistic activity might be viewed as simply a curious aberration in a community that has seen more than its share of social distress--similar in some ways to the development of rap in the bombed-out neighborhoods of the Bronx. But the artists of Papunya, representatives of what is being called the Western Desert School of Art, are seeing their work being snatched up by collectors both at home and overseas. At prices that range from several hundred dollars to nearly $15,000 for consigned large pieces, the art is highly affordable by international standards. Australian magnate Robert Holmes A’Court, one of the biggest collectors, recently paid $28,500 for an entire collection of pieces by three aboriginal artists.

While the financial rewards are one motivation for many artists (much of the income in Papunya comes via government welfare or unemployment benefits), that is clearly only one aspect to the scene. More important, the art provides pride among the artists as well as a way to re-kindle flagging interest in traditional aboriginal law and culture among young people.

“The young people who go into Alice, they don’t worry about their culture, the Dreamtime, what their fathers showed them,” says Michael Nelson. “They just go to town and get drunk up and forget about it. And when they get married their young sons might ask them: ‘Show me how to paint,’ and the father will say, ‘I don’t know.’ My father taught me these (patterns). There are so many painters but not many young people. Me, I’m interested in my culture. I want to hold on tight; keep it strong and show it to my children.”

This sentiment is articulated even more strongly by Allister, a white “bushie” who lives up the track from Papunya with his aboriginal wife (who is also a painter): “The painting is helping maintain aspects of the culture and make no mistake, the culture is disappearing. It can’t compete against video. How could it?

“Here you’ve got the oldest existing culture left, and it’s going down in a heap of rubbish and empty wine casks. These people know where they started. I went out to this rock with a friend of mine, and he said, ‘That’s my grandfather’s rock.’ We can’t begin to grapple with that.”

One white Australian who was able to cope with the complexity of aboriginal culture as well as the difficulties facing Papunya inhabitants was Geoff Bardon, a young arts and crafts teacher who came to teach at the Papunya elementary school in the late-’60s. Although an outsider, Bardon appreciated the importance of the Tingari, one of the central creation myths that is passed along generations through song, art, dance and folk tales.

For aboriginals, the learning of the Tingari is a lifelong practice, a process referred to as “high school.” As aboriginals in the bush came into more regular contact with European culture, young people began to lose interest in the Tingari and its law, dropping a thread of aboriginal culture that had continued unbroken for tens of thousands of years. To help foster an interest in traditional culture and ethics, Bardon started a mural project at the school in 1971, encouraging children to paint the walls of the school with the designs found in aboriginal sand paintings, the “art of the wind” that is instrumental to Tingari education.

Initially he encountered resistance from the children since such patterns are sacred information, the property of specific clans, sexes and initiates who have obtained a designated level of ritual education. He and an aide painted the first murals, illustrations that quickly attracted the interest of Papunya elders.

Subsequently Bardon was given the design for a Honey Ant Dreaming mural by some senior men of Papunya. From this mural, “Papunya Tula” (“Honey Ant Dreaming”), the art movement was born. The initiated older men suddenly saw a way to bring traditional art into public focus. As one magazine reporter noted in 1983, “(The murals) had the effect . . . of restoring a number of senior men in an immediate and visible way to their rightful roles as teachers, ceremonial custodians and spiritual leaders--whereas they had previously been ‘marginalized’ to the school community as grounds keepers or attendants, merely bystanders to a white-conceived educational process, rather than transmitters of tribal law and lore.”

It must be noted that the law of the Dreamtime stories is more than simply interesting myths and ancestral tales. It covers the gamut of traditional aboriginal life, from marriages to survival in one of the harshest environments in the world. The sand painting created during a ceremonial corroborees, with scores of men flattening out a hectare-sized area, decorating it with wild cotton, ocher, bird down and pebbles, may represent a topographical map that contains information that could prove vital to a nomadic family wandering in the desert in search of water or food.

“There are people who respond to the art just as contemporary art, which is how I responded to it at first,” says Gabrielle Pizzi, a Melbourne gallery owner. “And then their secondary thing is to look at it from an anthropological background.”

Pizzi is sitting in her gallery, Pizzi Gallery, on a trendy downtown side street. The main room of the gallery has a visiting exhibition by a white artist:various articles of clothing and jewelry highlighted by nails, spikes and jagged glass. It’s all leather and lace, violence and conflict. In contrast, the side gallery where Pizzi’s desk is situated is full of art work from Papunya--dots and lines, colors and designs that are vibrant yet soothing, complex yet immediately pleasing. They evoke associations with Jackson Pollack and Paul Klee, yet something is decidedly different. As Pizzi notes, they are abstract in form but not in content.

“It’s extraordinary what they can do with dots, circles, half circles and wavy lines.” Pizzi says. “In 40,000 years they’ve learned a few things. What’s nice about a lot of the paintings is they’re very resolved. A lot of contemporary Western art has a lot of Angst . They’re sort of tortured, and I think people are looking for something now that is pleasurable to look at rather than someone else’s unhappiness.”

Pizzi is the sole outlet in the state of Victoria for Papunya Tula, an artist’s cooperative that sprang from the seed planted by Geoff Bardon. And although she is obviously in the business of selling art--her 1983 collection of Papunya artists shown in Paris was sold in its entirety to Holmes A’Court, and state and national curators stop by the gallery often--her involvement extends beyond mere dollars and cents. Like other white Australians connected to the aboriginal art movement, Pizzi exhibits a pronounced protective tone when discussing the artists.

“One thing I fear is white interference--sociologists, anthropologists, journalists,” she says. “I can understand the white fascination, but I am very hesitant about going up to Papunya because I feel like it’s an infringement. Aboriginal people are by nature very polite. The more contact (with the outside world) there is, the more glib the art becomes.”

Dealing with aboriginal artists requires a different approach from Western artists, she adds. Paintings aren’t signed, a steady supply is never certain and the rough conditions of the artists’ work space can sometimes be seen in the finished canvas.

“It’s amazes me when the paintings come down in such good condition,” she says. “Once you get towards the Western Australia border (just west of Papunya), the wind just whips across with tremendous force. They paint on the ground, sometimes right out in the desert. There are dogs running across them, kids riding their bikes over them. Sometimes you’ll see the odd bit of grass that has got stuck to the acrylic.”

In the nine years that Pizzi has been involved with the Western Desert artists, she says she’s seen a change. Larger canvases are more popular and technique has become more refined. While some artists are learning to paint to a formula dictated by the market, there are always those who consistently paint original work. And, like gallery owners everywhere, she’s worried about second-class work being sold.

The white Australian who probably knows the most about the Western Desert artists is Daphne Williams, a 58-year-old widow from Alice Springs who spends a third of her time traveling hundreds of miles around the reserve, picking up finished canvases, paying artists and dropping off new supplies. She’s not an artist herself, has no art background and only speaks a smattering of the local dialect, Pintubi, yet Williams is the artists’ conduit to the world outside, one person they look to for support and advice when dealing with strangers.

Officially Williams is an employee of the 100 or so members of the Papunya Tula artists’ cooperative, yet her word obviously carries some weight. When outsiders come in to Papunya to talk to the artists, the standard reply is always:”Wait for Daphne.”

Despite the trust given her by the Papunya Tula artists, Williams maintains a strict distance. She has never observed a men’s corroboree and says she wouldn’t want to since it could damage her relationship with aboriginal women. Similarly, she refuses to voice any opinion regarding subject matter or media.

One change that Williams has noted in her eight years of work with Papunya Tula is that the movement is now being passed on to the next generation.

“For the (next generation) to paint they have to have gone through the aboriginal law,” she explains. “They virtually learn the designs through ceremonial education. Now some of the artists out at Kintore (160 miles west of Papunya) have started teaching their sons who are old enough, in their 20s and 30s. It means the old men are wanting to pass this down, the stories and the painting on canvas with European media. I think they see that as the cooperative continuing when they’re too old to paint.”

For now, however, the original founders of Papunya Tula are going strong. From a group of only 20 artists, the cooperative has grown to about 100, with members working at a host of communities, outstations and camps far removed from Papunya itself. Up the track at Yuendumu, another major aboriginal town known for artists, a similar cooperative has been set up based on Papunya Tula. Indeed all the way to Darwin at the top of Australia, the aboriginal modern art movement is in full swing.

Despite the number of artists and the inevitable overproduction, however, certain names keep cropping up as artists whose work is always interesting, well-executed and quickly sold: Clifford Possum Tjakamarra, Uta Uta Tjangala, Charlie Tjaruru Tjungurrayi and Michael Nelson Tjakamarra.

Besides the Sydney Opera House consignment, Nelson has been asked to do a major piece for the World’s Fair being held in Brisbane, and one of his earlier pieces has been reproduced for a massive mosaic at the new Parliament building in Canberra.

Although he’s only been painting four years, Nelson’s education in the patterns he uses began as a young boy.

“Your father or your grandfather tells you how to draw,” he says. “They tell you the story. We don’t have it in a big book. We’ve got it all in our heads, all the different drawings and stories and styles. First you go to initiation, then to high school, then to university. At 20, finished, you’re qualified and you can get married. It’s our law. They take you out a long way from the settlement for three or four months. When you come back you have a long beard, long hair and you’re different. You’ve got all the bigman stories in your head. Then you have to teach your children to carry on the story.”

It’s during the ceremonies, the corroborees, that the designs are taught. Elaborate song cycles are sung while the painting is being constructed in the sand so that the story and the design are permanently linked in the initiates’ memories. And, while the designs that Nelson and others use are based on those sacred patterns, the acrylic and canvas reproductions of Dreamtime stories are profane, intended for uninitiated eyes. Consequently the complete story or design is never given.

“No white people can understand,” says Nelson. “It’s pretty hard. We understand. The sand paintings are similar, but they’re special. You’ve got to keep the two separate. Sand painting is most important--much more important than these (paintings). In the ceremonies we only use red and white. The dots are mostly white. But in the (canvas) painting we’ve changed this. We use four colors and mix them.”

No ‘Dream Poaching’

Just as sand paintings and their stories are “owned” by certain clans, the dreamings also belong to the artists. “Dream poaching” is strictly forbidden. The dreamings are linked to specific landmarks in the desert that in turn are linked to specific clans.

“That painting I’m doing now, ‘Possum Dreaming,’ I could take you out to the place and show you the possum footprints in the stone,” says Nelson. “The stones, the figure. It’s from the dreaming, up near Yuendumu. I’m Warabi tribe. We used to travel from Yuendumu area to Ayers Rock. Long time ago.”

While different tribes throughout the desert share the same dreamings, the stories told and the colors used are different.

“I can tell a Yuendumu painting because it’s different, different colors,” says Nelson. “They have pink, light green, light yellow. That’s Yuendumu style. We use the dark colors. It’s a bit stronger.”

As one of the best-known artists in Papunya, Nelson is also one of the best paid. For the mosaic based on his painting in Canberra, he received $11,000. He doesn’t know what Daphne Williams will offer to pay him for “Possum Dreaming,” but she’ll have to take his asking price into account.

“If she doesn’t give me what I’ve asked for it, I’ll never give the painting,” he says confidently.

This hard-nosed attitude might sound very much like any Western artist, reluctant to part with his work. For Nelson, it’s not quite the same. Like most of the Western Desert artists, he doesn’t hoard favorite canvases. Indeed the very idea of property is inherently alien to aboriginal culture. Similarly the reverence with which many Western fine artists approach their product is unknown.

“What’s that place, America? The artists there don’t touch their (finished) paintings?” he asks, casually brushing dirt off from the canvas. “Why’s that? Our paintings, anyone can touch it. It’s acrylic, strong stuff. Sometimes when I’m tired I sleep on it.”