Ngkwarlerlaneme Modernism from Utopia, Central Australia

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Acknowledgements

Thanks to Anne Brody, Marc Gooch and Janet Pierce, whose experience working with these artists made this essay possible. Thanks also to Sharon Tassicker and Megan Schlipalius at the Janet Holmes à Court Collection and Christopher Hodges at Utopia Art Sydney for their time, and to Naomi Mossenson at Mossenson Galleries. The research for this essay was funded by ARC Discovery Project 110104509, Mobilising Remote Art Centre Records for Art History.

Notes

1. The human figure is photographed in Michael Boulter, The Art of Utopia: A New Direction in Contemporary Aboriginal Art (Sydney: Craftsman House, 1991), 137.

2. Anne Marie Brody, Utopia: A Picture Story (Perth: Heytesbury Holdings, 1989), 31.

3. This history is told in Boulter, The Art of Utopia, 114–7, while Emily's beginnings and the first of Gooch's projects is documented in Brody, Utopia. The first paintings are documented in Brody, Utopia Women's Paintings. The First Works on Canvas: A Summer Project 1988–89 (Perth: Heytesbury Holdings, 1989).

4. Artists active during the 1990s included Amy Petyarre, Angelina Pwerle, Audrey Kngwarreye, Audrey Petyarre, Casey Kemarre, David Kemarre, Hazel Kngwarreye, Janice Kngwarreye, Joy Kngwarreye, Katy Kemarre, Lily Kngwarreye, Mary Kemarre, Queenie Kemarre, Ruby Kngwarreye, Billy Morton and Wally Pwerle, as well as Janice Kngwarreye.

5. Emily's significance was first established for Australian audiences and within Australian art history by Emily Kame Kngwarreye: Alhalkere: paintings from Utopia, a retrospective of her work at the Queensland Art Gallery and the Art Gallery of New South Wales in 1988. For arguments establishing the significance of Emily to Australian art history, see the catalogue for this exhibition, Emily Kame Kngwarreye: Alhalkere: Paintings from Utopia, exh. cat. (Brisbane: Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane Australia, and MacMillan, 1998), 47–54; and the essays in a book published the same year, Emily Kngwarreye: Paintings (Sydney: Craftsman House, 1998). The recent National Museum of Australia retrospective was called Utopia: the Genius of Emily Kame Kngwarreye, and its catalogue continues the discourse on her modernism. See Margo Neale, ed., Utopia: the Genius of Emily Kame Kngwarreye, exh. cat. (Canberra: National Museum of Australia, 2008).

6. Elizabeth Harney and Ruth B. Phillips, ‘Introducing the Multiple Modernisms Project’, Artlink Australia 37, no. 2 (2017): 39.

7. It is worth noting that revisionist scholars of modernism are hardly unified in their revised definitions of modernity. While Bill Anthes and Elaine O'Brien, for example, find Marshall Berman's theory of modernism suited to describing Native American and global modernism, respectively, Ian Mclean and Peter Osborne are highly critical of Berman's conflation of capitalism with modernity. See Bill Anthes, Native Moderns: American Indian Painting, 1940–1960 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006), xx–xxi; Elaine O'Brien, ‘General Introduction: The Location of Modern Art’ in Modern Art in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, ed. Elaine O'Brien (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013), 10; Ian McLean, ‘Contemporaneous Traditions: The World in Indigenous Art/Indigenous Art in the World’, Humanities Research 19, no. 2 (2013): 55–7; Peter Osborne, ‘Modernity is a Qualitative, Not a Chronological, Category’, New Left Review 192 (March–April 1992): 65–84. At the time of writing, the Euro-American history of modern art remains the dominant story of modernism in undergraduate art history courses. These include Curtin University's VIS27: Modernism in Art and Design; Griffith University's 2104QCM: 20th Century Modernism; the University of Melbourne's AHiS10002: Modern Art: The Politics of the New; the University of New South Wales's SAHT2225: Irrational Modernism: Decadence, Deviance, Madness; and the University of Western Australia's HART2223: Modernism and the Visual Arts (a course the author teaches).

8. For comparisons of Emily's paintings to Jackson Pollock in the 1990s, see Terry Smith, ‘Kngwarreye, Woman Abstract Painter’, in Emily Kngwarrreye: Paintings (Sydney: Craftsman House), 28, 30; and Roger Benjamin, ‘A New Modernist Hero’, in Emily Kame Kngwarreye: Alhalkere: Paintings from Utopia, exh. cat. (Brisbane: Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane Australia, and MacMillan, 1998), 47.

9. See, for example, Heather Ellyard, ‘Big Yam Dreaming’, Art & Australia 36, no. 4 (1999): 490.

10. Anonymous art centre manager, interview with the author, 2011.

11. Benjamin, ‘A New Modernist Hero’, 47–54. Recently in this journal, Jeanette Hoorn argued that Benjamin's interpretation is ‘indecorous’, but I think that Benjamin's point is not that Emily was not feminine, but that she was only able to occupy the masculine place of the genius because her femininity was ignored. Emily becomes a way to trace the limits of Linda Nochlin's argument that the concept of the artist genius is a function of masculine power. See Hoorn, ‘Rejoinder to Review: Hilda Rix Nicholas and Elsie Rix's Moroccan Idyll, Art and Orientalism’, Australian and New Zealand Journal of Art 17, no. 1 (2017): 126; and Linda Nochlin, ‘Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists? (1971)’, Women, Art, and Power and Other Essays, ed. Linda Nochlin (London: Thames and Hudson, 1991), 145–78.

12. Regarding ‘commercial fine arts or pseudo-traditional arts … although they are made with eventual sale in mind, they adhere to culturally embedded aesthetic and formal standards’. See Nelson H. H. Graburn, ‘Introduction: Arts of the Fourth World’, in Ethnic and Tourist Arts: Cultural expressions from the Fourth World, ed. Nelson H. H. Graburn (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976), 6.

13. Boulter, The Art of Utopia, 116.

14. Graburn, Ethnic and Tourist Arts, 6.

15. Quoted in John Carty, ‘Purnu, Tjanpi, Canvas: A Ngaanyatjarra Art History,’ in Ngaanyatjarra: Art of the Lands, ed. Tim Acker and John Carty (Perth: University of Western Australia Publishing, 2012), 29.

16. Philip Batty, ‘The Gooch Effect: Rodney Gooch and the Art of the Art Advisor’, in Gooch's Utopia: Collected works from the Central Desert, exh. cat. (Adelaide: Flinders University Gallery, 2008), 28.

17. Marc Gooch and Janet Pierce, interview with the author, 2015.

18. See Jennifer Isaacs, ‘Anmatyerre Artist’, in Emily Kngwarreye: Paintings, 17.

19. Julia Murray, ‘Drawn Together: The Utopia batik phenomenon’, in Across the Desert: Aboriginal batik from Central Australia, exh. cat. (Melbourne: National Gallery of Victoria), 121.

20. See Philip Batty, ‘The Gooch Effect’, 26–31; Boulter, The Art of Utopia, 28–30; Brody, ‘Reflections on the Rodney Gooch Files’, in Indigenous Archives: The Making and Unmaking of Aboriginal Art, ed. Darren Jorgensen and Ian McLean (Perth: University of Western Australia Publishing, 2017), 25–49; Rodney Gooch and Louise Haigh, ‘Louise Haigh Talks to Rodney Gooch’, in Gooch's Utopia, 20–2; Christopher Hodges, ‘Rodney Gooch: A Full Life in the Desert’, in Gooch's Utopia, 24–5; Fiona Salmon, ‘Gooch's Utopia’, in Gooch's Utopia, 12–9; Chrischona Schmidt, ‘Rodney Gooch's Role and Influence in the Development of the Utopia Art Movement’, International Journal of the Arts in Society 5, no. 6 (2011): 149–61.

21. Boulter, The Art of Utopia, 115.

22. Marc Gooch and Janet Pierce, Interview with the author, 2015.

23. This is photographed in Boulter, The Art of Utopia, 125.

24. This is photographed in Brody, Contemporary Aboriginal Art: from the Robert Holmes a Court Collection (Perth: Heytesbury Holdings, 1990), 90.

25. Boulter, The Art of Utopia, 116.

26. Judith Ryan, Colour Power: Aboriginal Art Post-1984, exh. cat. (Melbourne: National Gallery of Victoria, 2004), 157.

27. Boulter, The Art of Utopia, 116.

28. The earliest surviving snake carving might be a walking stick with a snake wrapped around it that was collected from 1930 to 1935 in the mining town of Payne's Find in Western Australia. With thanks to Chris Malcolm of John Curtin Gallery, who told me it is in the Berndt Museum of Anthropology. Snakes wrapped around trees were also sculpted by the early Papunya artists. One from 1973 by Clifford Possum Tjapaltjarri is in the National Museum of Australia's collection, accession number 2005.0078.0001.

29. Marc Gooch and Janet Pierce, Interview with the author, 2015.

30. The most influential revisionist history was Henry Reynolds, The Other Side of the Frontier: Aboriginal Resistance to the European Invasion of Australia (Melbourne: Penguin, 1982).

31. The most notorious of these is Keith Windshuttle, The Fabrication of Aboriginal History, Vols 1 and 3 (Sydney: Macleay Press, 2003 and 2007).

32. Rex Butler, ‘The Impossible Painter’, Australian Art Collector 2 (1997): 45.

33. Across the Desert: Aboriginal Batik from Central Australia was held at the National Gallery of Victoria from October 10, 2008 to February 1, 2009. See Across the Desert: Aboriginal Batik from Central Australia.

34. Brody, Utopia: A Picture Story, 31. Audrey Petyarre's Ngkawarlerlaneme Scene (1989) is documented in this book on p. 33, and in Contemporary Aboriginal Art, exh. cat. (Perth: Heytesbury Holdings, 1990), 75. See also Audrey Kngwarreye's Camp Scene (1990) in Boulter, The Art of Utopia, 92, as well as in her Camp Site (1989) and in Mary Kemarre, Camp Scene (1990), reproduced in Gooch's Utopia, 62 and 63. Audrey and Mary were two of the first sculptors from Ngkwarlerlaneme.

35. Boulter, The Art of Utopia, 64. Hodges cited in Christine Nicholls, ‘Ronnie and Co: The Making of the Gooch collections’, in Gooch's Utopia, 39. Original italics removed.

36. Boulter, The Art of Utopia, 62.

37. Brody, Utopia: A Picture Story, 150. Brody's story of collecting this story is in the same publication, 16–17.

38. This is likely to be taken from documentation written on behalf of the artists by Rodney Gooch, and is reproduced in Contemporary Aboriginal Art, exh. cat. (Perth: Heytesbury Holdings, 1990), 112.

39. Brody, A Picture Story, 152.

40. Louise Haigh and Rodney Gooch, ‘Louise Haigh talks to Rodney Gooch’, in Gooch's Utopia, 22.

41. Marc Gooch and Janet Pierce, interview with the author, 2015.

42. See Rex Butler, ‘Beyond the Revolution: Is Aboriginal Art as we know it finished?’, in How Aborigines Invented the Idea of Contemporary Art, ed. Ian McLean (Brisbane: Institute of Modern Art, 2011), 322.

43. See Vivien Johnson, Once Upon a Time in Papunya (Sydney: NewSouth, 2010), 11–43.