Art Review : Uplifting View From Down Under : Contemporary Art of Indigenous Aussies Bridges Cultural Gap With ‘Dreamtime’

Today it’s called the Pacific Asia Museum. It roosts in a wonderful Pasadena landmark building in Chinese Imperial Palace courtyard style.

But L.A. contemporary art buffs remember the place as the launching pad for our avant-garde back in the ‘60s, when it was the Pasadena Museum and its director was Walter Hopps. Hopps organized the first retrospective of Marcel Duchamp’s art there and gave a series of exhibitions conferring institutional credence on everybody from Ed Kienholz to Joe Goode. Now the place is devoted to the arts of Asia and the Pacific Rim--and if that appears a bit too conventional to vanguard votaries, they should pack up their bread, wine and cheese and make a pilgrimage to a current exhibition that Duchamp himself would have smiled upon.

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Its title is a mouthful. “The Evolving Dreamtime: Contemporary Art by Indigenous Australians From the Kelton Family Foundations Collection.” Its curator is Kerry Smallwood, who presents some 150 paintings and artifacts by descendants of the original inhabitants of the great continent down under. It’s the first part of the first large-scale exhibition to examine this work. The present group comes from Central and Southern regions. Next year the Northern section will appear at the museum. Pity there is no catalogue for this important show.

Suddenly the pessimist within is alarmed. This isn’t one of those all-to-frequent instances of well-meaning whites messing into a noble native art and turning it into tourist kitsch, is it?

Introductory galleries douse that fear, only to ignite another: that it’s going to be a worthy, slightly dull, didactic show. There are a few works in boring English watercolor landscape style, but mostly the rooms have the flavor of a show in a museum of cultural history. Wall labels remind us of pertinent facts. Indigenous Australians represent the oldest continuous culture on the planet. They migrated to the island continent some 50,000 years ago from Southeast Asia. They were hunter-gatherers whose lore was transmitted down the generations by oral tradition and paintings executed most often in sand, on bodies or on wood. There were as many as 600 distinct tribal groups speaking as many as 300 languages at the time of the first western contact. There was considerable stylistic variation in the art of the groups.

Most of the work looks like abstrac tion consisting of rough ovals radiating wavy lines executed in pointillist dots and rendered, of course, in earth tones. The effect is quite decorative but not bland. Dots make a basket-like texture. Right. Decorative abstract art.

Wrong. These pictures tell stories. The fact that we can’t read them brings up an interesting question of just who is illiterate around here. Shapes and their placement function as hieroglyphs for those who can decipher them. They tell tales of the Australian aborigines’ creation myth, the Dreamtime. They function as maps. They act as tablets of the law at ritual ceremonies.

So far this is all very interesting but one feels more educated than moved. Something stirs within this work, a kind of hallucinogenic power, but it doesn’t quite blossom.

Maybe there is an unbridgeable cultural gap here. Maybe present-day inheritors of this art have lost touch with their roots. Mulling this over, the visitor crosses an open corridor, glimpses the museum’s lovely courtyard and enters the main gallery.

Wow. Suddenly and finally it happens.

It’s a large composition by Clifford Possum Tjapaltjarri. As dark and sumptuous as an imperial Chinese court painting, it is also as unexpected as an Abstract Expressionist masterpiece. Its title, “Yuutjutiyungu Ancestral Tales of Mt. Allen Sites,” is mysterious and stately. It’s easy to imagine artists like Richard Pousette-Dart or Lee Mullican or for that matter Jean Dubuffet admiring it and seeing something of themselves in it too.

From here on there is no question, this is an art exhibition. Clearly, many of these artists have been formally trained in the Western tradition. A few suffer from it, making bad knock-off of figurative styles. The best work adds fluency in the native tradition to mastery of the international mainstream of classic modernist abstraction.

Max Mansell’s “The Firebringers” has an elegant psychedelic aura and a texture so rich it looks beaded. Emily Kame Kngwarreye’s “Awelye (My Dreaming)” uses the foreign pictorial device of atmospheric rendering to transform her map-like native style into an great explosion of lyric color.

Just as there is more to Australia than kangaroos, there is more to this art than abstraction. Sally Morgan uses a pop-flavored folk style. Her “Terra Nullus” depicts a red mountain dotted with weeping black people on crucifixes, under a rainbow. It intends to protest injustice against aboriginal people but avoids mawkishness. Maybe a subtler sort of brief against inequity is embodied in Bronwyn Bancroft’s “Spiritual Exposure.” Its spooky green poltergeist figure and outsider style bespeak the fears of the imprisoned soul.

* Pacific Asia Museum, 46 N. Los Robles Ave., Pasadena, through Jan. 22, closed Mon.-Tues. (818) 449-2742.