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Abstract
Aboriginal Australian acrylic paintings have long been considered representations of mythologically invested landscape. This understanding has been made problematic by recent writings on ‘dwelling’. As common usage of the term ‘landscape’ seems to prioritize vision, to suggest that the acrylic paintings are landscapes only strengthens the suspicion that they are artifacts of displacement or distancing, rather than examples of the emplacement emphasized in this ‘dwelling perspective’. However, this paper will demonstrate that the relationship between acrylic painting and the land is more complex than such an interpretation. It will argue that the Aboriginal objectification of their relationship to the land is not inherently a distancing of the land.
Acknowledgments
An earlier version of this paper was presented at the AHRC workshop on ‘The ecology of perception and the aesthetics of landscape’, 26–27 March 2007: École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Paris. I thank the organizers for inviting me and bringing this question into discussion. I thank Faye Ginsburg and Sabra Thorner, and the anonymous reviewers for Ethnos, for arduous contributions to editing and revising.
Notes
1 I began field research with Pintupi-speaking people at Yayayi, NT, in July 1973, two years after the acrylic painting movement began at Papunya. I did further intensive field research with Pintupi people in 1979, 1981, 1984, and 1988. Since then, I have had repeated engagements and conversations with Pintupi as well as others involved in the Aboriginal art world (Myers Citation2002).
2 Famous examples include Coronation Hill (Brunton Citation1991; Merlan Citation1991), Hindmarsh Island (Weiner Citation1995; Tonkinson Citation1997), and the Gove Peninsula (Williams Citation1986).
3 See Gumbert (Citation1984) and more especially Povinelli (Citation1993, Citation2002) for critical discussion of the capacity of the liberal state to recognize Indigenous difference.
4 I use Ancestral, capitalized, to refer to the culturally specific beings described as ‘The Dreaming’ and to differentiate these from some generic notion of ancestry as forebears.
5 See also Povinelli (Citation1993) for an ethnographically Australian critique of the dichotomy.
6 Examples include David (Citation2002), Tamisari (Citation1998), and Vachon (2005).
7 The terms ‘bark’ and ‘acrylic’ represent the different media and traditions of Indigenous art in Northern Australia and Central Australia, respectively.
8 For a history of painting in this community and the establishment of Papunya Tula Artists Pty Ltd as a cooperative, see Bardon (Citation1979, Citation1991) and Myers (Citation2002).
9 They are ‘signs’ in the Peircean sense:A sign is something which stands to somebody for something in some respect or capacity. It addresses somebody, that is, creates in the mind of that person an equivalent sign, or perhaps a more developed sign. That sign which it creates I call the interpretant of the first sign. The sign stands for something, its object. (Peirce 1958: 2.228.)
10 For a brilliant study of such changes in a nearby tradition, see Carty and French (2011).
11 I am using the term ‘bosses’ here as a translation of ‘mayutju’ in Pintupi, a term that refers to those who have ceremonial prerogatives as custodians of a place or ceremony. I do not mean by this usage to refer to the contrast between ‘custodians’ (kirta) and ‘managers’ (kurtungurlu) that are also commonly used among Pintupi and Warlpiri. See Myers (Citation1986).
12 Restrictions on the display of these ritually explicit older paintings prevent me from offering images of them here.
13 Women's painting – which developed in the 1980s at Yuendumu, and in the early 1990s with Pintupi women – has escaped this problem of unintended circulation, having begun after the initial concerns about inappropriate revelation were aired.
14 Shorty Lungkarta Tjungurrayi was one of my closest consultants in my first fieldwork at Yayayi, NT in 1973–1975, at Yinyilingki, NT in 1979, and at New Bore, NT in 1981. Although he left the bush for the ration depot at Haasts Bluff in the late 1940s, he remained fundamentally oriented to the lifestyle and values with which he grew up.
15 This painting was reproduced in Sotheby's Important Aboriginal Art Catalog, 1997: 22).
16 See Jorgensen's (Citation2011: 42) critique of Rothwell's repeated evocation of the passage of Aboriginal artists ‘and the end of Aboriginal art as we once knew it’.
17 Brown v Western Australia (No 2) [2003] FCA 556 (4 June 2003).