ART REVIEW : Aboriginal Dreamtime

If you’re in doubt as to the perversity of what’s going on in the art auction houses of New York, a visit to the current show at the Museum of Natural History will bring into focus the degree to which art has become estranged from its own soul.

“Dreamings: The Art of Aboriginal Australia” could be described as a refresher course in the spiritual roots of art--roots that are being trampled by speculators stampeding to the cash register as they dither on about commerce and acquisition.

The first major exhibition of Aboriginal art to come to the United States, “Dreamings” (which originated in Australia and continues here through Aug. 6), is a historical rather than a contemporary survey, although some recent work is included. The few rare pieces in the show that date back to the 1800s reveal how little this art has changed over the last 100 years. As with the American Indian, Aboriginal culture is rooted in a mystical interpretation of nature, which is expressed through a complex system of fables and beliefs, and the Aborigines haven’t found it necessary to give either their beliefs or their visual iconography a fresh coat of paint. The idea of newness, so hot here in the West, doesn’t seem to impress the Aborigine, who claim the oldest continuous tradition of visual art on Earth (30,000 years at least--twice the age of the Lascaux Cave paintings).

Focusing on work from a broad band of territory in Central Australia including the tropical North, the desert hinterland and the tropical Southeast, the show reflects little regional differentiation to the untrained eye. This could have something to do with the fact that artistic creativity and originality are frowned upon by the Aborigine. According to their laws, only the Dreamings were original; people simply copy.

So, what are the Dreamings? This highly charged word has several different meanings. For starters, the Dreaming is how the Aborigine describe the beginning of the world when the land took shape and acquired its features. Dreamings also refers to Aborigine ancestral creatures who took the form of plants, animals and the elements when the Earth was young. Dreaming connotes spirit or soul, and every conceivable thing on earth has a dreaming--there’s a diarrhea Dreaming, a dead body Dreaming, a honey Dreaming. Dreaming is also the law, and groups of people who share the same Dreaming constitute a tribe (one tribe may not infringe on the Dreaming of another).

The Aborigine treat their Dreamings with great reverence, yet the Dreamtime is not an idealized mythology. Ancestral beings fell prey to all kinds of human folly, and Aboriginal mythology is a veritable smorgasbord of mischief and mayhem.

The visual style of this art revolves around earth tones, and complex patterning involving dots and motifs evocative of all manner of things in the natural world--honeycombs, reptile scales, spider webs. Looking vaguely Asian one minute, psychedelic the next, the work is as painstakingly detailed as a Tibetan Buddhist sand mandala--and is equally impenetrable. The deeper meanings of these images can be revealed only to Aborigine initiates, so, while we in the West can appreciate the formal intensity of an exhaustingly complicated design like “Bush Cabbage Dreaming at Ngarlu,” the real significance of this heavily coded image remains a mystery.

Because the multiple meanings behind Aboriginal paintings remains so veiled, it’s easier to respond to their sculpture, which tends to be less abstract and has the lively, whimsical charm of folk art (this is not to suggest that the sculpture is less complex than Aboriginal painting; rather, it’s more accessible in that it offers us at least one recognizable handle to latch on to). A collection of sculptural way-markers left at abandoned camps to reveal the destination of a departed group would look right at home in Howard Finster’s Paradise Garden.

There’s nothing a debauched culture loves more than innocence, purity and primitivism, and we have a tendency to idealize the Aborigine (check such films as Nicolas Roeg’s “Walkabout,” Peter Weir’s “The Last Wave” or Werner Herzog’s “Where the Green Ants Dream”). The Aborigines are not unsullied by modern life and have embraced aspects of the West enthusiastically--they love sugar and Range Rovers, for instance.

Nonetheless, the thing central to their culture--their Dreamtime--is not for sale. There were several works that the curators of this exhibition wanted to include in “Dreamings” and could not. The pieces were too potent, too private to travel out of Australia, according to Aborigine law. There’s something wonderful about that.

(The Caz Gallery in West Hollywood, one of the co-sponsors of “Dreamings,” will present an exhibition titled “The Aboriginal Australian” in conjunction with the exhibit at the Natural History Museum. Running through July 29, the show features a sand painting to be completed on the floor of the gallery by an Aboriginal sand painter.)