- I am conscious that the title of this paper is provocatively loaded. I have done this for two reasons: firstly in debt to Ian Burn, through whose visual acuity and capacity to give particular value to speaking out the process of looking, much has been added to the discipline of art history in Australia in the past twenty years. His claims for the ‘evidence’ of artists’ intuitions was salutory, and indeed, Ian himself never shunned an opportune use of rhetoric or provocation. Secondly, given the stage at which I am writing about this project, a great deal of ‘visual evidence’ must remain suggestive, awaiting confirmation through exegetical and other means.
- Authors Note: I have followed conventions of spelling applied in Central Arnhem Land.
- This was largely due to the dedication of Alan Fidock, who was a missionary teacher at Milingimbi during this period.
- See David H. Bennett, ‘Malangi: The Man Who Was Forgotten Before He Was Remembered’ Aboriginal History, 4:1,1980, pp. 41–47
- A related tradition has evolved in Eastern Arnhem Land: however the historical nature of this linkage is necessarily the topic of another paper.
- Karel Kupka, Dawn of Art, Angus and Robertson, Sydney, 1965, p. 109. In his distinctive interpretation of such paintings, Karel Kupka coined the term ‘painted literature’ to describe their complex quasi-linguistic structure.
- See Luke Taylor, in J.C. Altman (ed), Emergent Inequalities in Aboriginal Australia, Sydney, 1989.
- Which is not to say that there is some art of this kind which is produced out of an urgent need for cash, or by people learning to paint.
- Luke Taylor, lecture, ‘Painting for the Market in Western Arnhem Land’, Canberra School of Art, 6th April, 1994. See also his ‘The Rainbow Serpent as Visual Metaphor in Western Arnhem Land’, Oceania, 60, p300.
- Nelson H.H. Graburn, (ed), Ethnic and Tourist Arts: Cultural Expressions from the Fourth World, University of California Press, Berkeley, 1976
- Nancy Williams, ‘Australian Aboriginal Art at Yirrkala: Introduction and Development of Marketing’ in Graburn 1976, pp. 280 and 282.
- ibid p. 278.
- ibid p. 270.
- A classic example is the painting by Yirawala from the early 1970s, Red Plains Kangaroo in the Arnotts Collection at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney.
- The Namatjira is reproduced in J.V.S. Hardy, J.V.S Megaw, and M. R. Megaw, The Heritage of Namatjira, William Heinemann Australia, Port Melbourne, 1992. Figure 1.16.
- This is not the first time such a connection has been made. In 1977 Robert Layton made a passing comparison between a bark painting by Yirrkala artist Mowara Djunggawul Story, 1967, and Duchamp's Nude Descending the Staircase, in his ‘Naturalism and Cultural Relativity’ in Ucko, Peter J. (ed), Form in Indigenous Art, Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies, Canberra, 1977, p.35. Any number of similar comparisons with the art of that region might be made if apparently fragmentary pictorial structure is the primary criterion. The analysis in the present paper seeks to go beyond the assumptions of cultural relativity inherent in such formal analogies.
- In the 1981 Perspecta exhibition at the Art Gallery of NSW, paintings by David Aspden and Clifford Possum Tjapaltjari/Time Leura Tjapaltjari were paired across the central exhibition space.
- Mary H. Nooter, (ed), Secrecy: African Art that Conceals and Reveals, The Museum for African Art, New York and Prestel, Munich, 1993. (quoted in African Arts, January, 1993, p 58). 19. ibid.
- Howard Morphy, Ancestral Connections: Art and an Aboriginal System of Knowledge, Chicago University Press, 1991, p. 96.
- Ian Keen, Knowledge and Secrecy in an Aboriginal Religion, Clarendon Press, Oxford: 1994, p. 6.
- Williams, op. cit. p. 271–3.
- The contemporary painter Djiwada refers to the semi-circular form ambiguously as both waterhole and gundirr (termite nest), the home of the wititj.
- The transition from Dawidi painting in the ‘style’ of Yilkarri to the ‘style’ of Daurangulili can be traced to the period recorded photographically by Kupka in 1960. See Kupka 1965: 38b.
- Michael Fried, Courbet's Realism, Chicago University Press, 1990 p. 131–2. In his reference to ‘Courbet's propensity for calling into question the ontological impermeability of the bottom framing-edge’, Fried suggests that ‘the bottom of the picture is subject to exceptional pressures in Courbet's art because, considered as part of the representational field, it lies nearer the painter-beholder than other portions of that field and so is the threshold that must be crossed, placed behind him, if the separation between painting and painter-beholder is to be undone and the two are somehow to be merged in a single quasi-corporeal entity.’
- Nelson H.H. Graburn, ‘Art and Acculturative Processes’, International Social Science Journal 21: 457–468, 1969, Paris UNESCO.
- Nicholas Thomas, ‘A second reflection: opposition and irresolution in contemporary Maori art’, paper given to the Research School of Pacific Studies at the Australian National University (20 April, 1994). The term ‘neo-traditional’ is used by Ben-Amos to describe the necessary orientation of once traditional carvers in Benin to European patronage (Graburn 1976 p. 332).
- Peter Wollen, Raiding the Icebox: Reflections on Twentieth Century Culture, Verso, London, 1993. p. 196.
- ibid.
- European presence in Arnhem Land was minimal in the first three decades of the century, and has been restricted since the formation of the Arnhem Land Aboriginal Reserve in 1931.
- ‘Although the specific form and composition of bark paintings were [themselves] innovations of the late 1930s, the subject matter itself has remained traditional. Thus, bark paintings now serve as an additional means of ensuring that the stories and the knowledge that is embedded in them will be transmitted to further generations.’ Williams, p. 280.
Australian Journal of Art
Volume 12, 1994 - Issue 1: In Memoriam: Ian Burn