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ART : Aboriginal Rites Explored Through Modern Means

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Suppose descendants of the Cro-Magnons who painted animals on the walls of caves in Lascaux, France, thousands of years ago were still plugging away in the same style. And suppose one fine day, someone came knocking on their door, bringing them a batch of canvases and paints so they could transfer their vision to a more portable form for the world to see.

Ridiculous, you say. It couldn’t possibly happen.

But in one of life’s bizarre twists, this is a real-life scenario--not from France but from the central and western desert of Australia. There, for the past 40,000 years, aboriginals have made sand paintings with clay-like ochers and bird fluff that painstakingly encode sacred mythological events dating as far back as the Ice Age.

In 1971, a teacher at one of the government settlements that now house the various tribes organized a group of aborigine men to paint murals on the school walls--which simultaneously introduced the aborigines to the notion of painting on a vertical surface and to modern-day acrylics. The obvious next step was to make portable individual paintings.

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Buzzing with concentric circles, dots, wavy lines and small markings, and ranging in coloration from muted black, browns and ochers to bright blues, greens and rose, these “dreamtime” paintings on pieces of Masonite look like lively abstractions. But the works--at the Modern Museum of Art in Santa Ana through April 16 in a show drawn from the Kelton Foundation in Los Angeles--have intensely specialized meanings to the people who make them.

Dreamtime is the aborigine’s way of explaining the origins of his world, when mythical heroes created the landscape as they traveled, hunted and fought in it. Once the heroes created all the flora and fauna--including human beings--they sank back into the Earth.

Every male aborigine inherits a “dreaming,” a collection of rituals, stories, symbols and patterns taught to him when he becomes an adult. The dreaming delineates both the mythological events and the landscapes that figure in his family and tribal genealogy.

Some of these events and places are considered particularly sacred, and they do not appear in the all-too-public acrylic paintings. Nor are women initiated into the most sacred mysteries; their dreamings are about more down-to-earth aspects of life: children, food gathering and fertility.

The knowledge that each detail of every painting is there not because it looks good (in fact, the aboriginals have no word for “art”) but because it conveys a specific meaning to the initiated can’t help but be a source of continual fascination to the Western viewer. A few of the patterns have been decoded and the Kelton Foundation provides a brief explanatory note for each of the paintings in the exhibit.

In general, concentric circles stand for central locations where important things have happened: water holes, campfires, caves, mountains. Some paintings represent territory spanning many miles; others zero in on tiny segments of that landscape. Space between objects may represent the passage of time as well as distance.

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Animal tracks show movement as well as resting places (tail prints mark the stopping points). U-shaped forms are seated people (the shape mimics the outline of buttocks on the ground). And the ubiquitous dots--substituting for the bird fluff in the sand paintings--represent the small clumps of grasses growing throughout the region.

Latching on to snippets of information like this does not give us the keys to the kingdom, however. In a fashion reminiscent of the cult behavior surrounding some contemporary art, we are assured that there are mysteries within mysteries in the dreamtime paintings. As one of the painters smugly told a visitor: “I know and you don’t.”

But we neophyte viewers are at liberty to compare various styles in this work. Tellingly, there are big differences between the paintings of the early ‘70s and the later ones.

Although the earliest paintings have a limited tonal range, a delightful looseness in the application of paint and the most abstract-looking markings, the later paintings are brighter and tighter (some have dots so regular they seem machine made) and sometimes feature blandly spic-and-span designs. Yet others contain more intricate designs, layered motifs symbolizing sequential events.

As is sadly common to rural craftsmanship that meets with approval in the outside world, some of the changes are apparently the result of crass new influences--from the government agency advisers who supply the art materials and tend to urge greater “neatness,” and from marketplace pressures on the fewer than 200 aborigines who turn out the paintings. (Only one person is generally credited for each work, although several people collaborate on the large pieces, rather like American quilters.)

On the other hand, the acrylic paintings are providing anthropologists with permanent records of tribal myths that--rendered as sand paintings--have literally vanished in the wind. And the money the painters are earning has enabled some of them to leave the government settlements and build their own homes on ancestral land.

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Richard Kelton, president of the Los Angeles foundation (a private corporation that promotes scientific expeditions and collects ethnographic materials), first saw the dreamtime paintings a decade ago in a gallery in Sydney, Australia. The collection--which also includes bark paintings in two vastly different styles from the northern, coastal Arnhem Land region of Australia--has grown to 100 works, about two-thirds of which are in the exhibit.

Incidentally, if “dreamtime” sounds oddly familiar for all its exoticism, that’s because another exhibit of similar material--”Dreamings: The Art of the Aboriginal Australian”--opened last fall at the Asia Society in New York. The coded methods of conveying information in these works understandably enthralled the significant portion of the contemporary art world concerned with isolating and examining the “language” of art.

Those who are entranced by aboriginal painting will be happy to know that the Asia Society show is en route to the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County, where it opens May 13.

“The Abstract Reality: Australian Dreamtime Art” remains on view through April 16 at the Modern Museum of Art, Griffin Towers, 5 Hutton Centre Drive, Santa Ana. Hours are 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesday through Friday, noon to 5 p.m. Saturday and Sunday. Admission is free. Information: (714) 754-4111.

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