NOTES
- Exhibited as part of Genius of Place: The Work of Kathleen Petyarre, Survey Exhibition, Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, New South Wales, Australia, 9 May-22 July, 2001.
- C. Nicholls, “Genius of Place: The Life and Art of Kathleen Petyarre,” in Kathleen Petyarre: Genius of Place, Kent Town: Wakefield Press, 2001, 6–32,24.
- J. Ryan, “In the Beginning is my End: The Singular Art of Emily Kame Kngwarreye,” in M. Neale (ed) Emily Kame Kngwarreye: Alkherge Paintings from Utopia, South Brisbane: Queensland Art Gallery 1998, 39–46, 41.
- This paper, it should be stressed, is a work of interpretation. I employ ethnographically-derived interpretations in innovative ways in order to open-up new ways of thinking about Central and Western Desert art, and in turn, to foster new ways of anthropological theorising. Hence, I take what might be seen as a certain ethnographic license. That is, this paper is based on field research conducted with Warlpiri not Anmatyerre/Alyawarr people. I have not met Kathleen Petyarre and have access to her work only through the paintings and texts represented here.
- C. Nicholls, “Kathleen Petyane: Genius of Place,” Cardboard Exhibition Card, Sydney: Museum of Contemporary Art, nd, original emphasis.
- I have explored this problematic depiction elsewhere at length, see J. Biddle “The Warlpiri Alphabet and Other Colonial Fantasies” Visual Communication, Vol. 1, No. 3, October 2002 267–292; “Writing without Ink: Literacy, Methodology and Cultural Difference” in Alison Lee and Cate Poynton (eds), Culture and Text, Sydney: Allen and Unwin 2000; “When Not Writing is Writing,” Australian Aboriginal Studies, 1, 1996, 21–33 and “Dot, Circle, Difference” in R. Diprose and R. Ferrell (eds), Cartographies: Post-structuralism and the Mapping of Bodies and Spaces, North Sydney: Allen and Unwin 27–39.
- H. L. Gates Jr., The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African-American Literary Criticism, New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988.
- Shelly Errington makes the point that the very category of so called “Primitive” art relies on “iconicity” as a determinative criterion, see S. Errington, The Death of Authentic Primitive Art and Other Tales of Progress, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998.
- C. Nicholls, “Genius of Place,” 29 original emphasis.
- Quoted in E. van Alphen, Francis Bacon and the Loss of Self, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992, 21.
- I borrow this argument from E van Alphen who makes a similar point in relation to the work of Bacon, 12. I am here as elsewhere in this paper indebted to his analysis, and specifically, his development of affective reading.”
- See J. Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex”, New York and London: Routledge, 1993 and Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, New York: Routledge, 1990.
- It is not only Petyarre's work which enacts this activation of Ancestral potency. Arguably, all Central and Western Desert art works perform this productivity.
- C. S. Pierce, The Writings of Charles Saunders Pierce: A Chronological Edition, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982.
- I have outlined these concrete, regulatory conditions of inscription in detail elsewhere and hence, abbreviate here only, see J. Biddle, “The Warlpiri Alphabet” and “Inscribing Identity: Skin as Country in the Central Desert”, in Sara Ahmed and Jackie Stacey (eds), Thinking Through the Skin, London and New York: Routledge 2001, 17–193.
- G. Deleuze, Repitition and Difference, trans. Paul Paton, New York: Columbia University Press, 1994, 90.
- N. Munn, “The Transformation of Subjects into Objects in Walbiri and Pitjantjatjara Myth,” in Berndt, R. M. (ed), Australian Aboriginal Anthropology, Nedlands: University of Western Australia Press, 1971, 141–162.
- For further discussion see M.J. Meggitt, Desert People: A Study of the Walbiri Aborigines of Central Australia, North Ryde: Angus and Robertson, 1962, 270–280.
- C. Watson, “Touching the Land: Towards an Aesthetic of Balgo Contemporary Painting” in H. Morphy and M. Smith-Bowles (eds), From the Land: Dialogues with the Kluge-Ruhe Collection of Australian Aboriginal Art, Charlottesville: University of Virginia, 1999.
- It is not only in ritual situations that such inscriptions occur. “My own skin, and others,” was often “read” for—and as—signs of Ancestral and human contact, during my fieldwork. Rashes, bruises, and boils particularly, might reveal country visited, plants and/or insects resident; activities conducted. Here as elsewhere in Aboriginal daily practices, the Durkheimian distinction between the sacred and the profane coalesces. Ancestors (including their marks, their makings; their sentiments and sensibilities) co-inhabit the lived and embodied world of the everyday.
- It is helpful here to contrast this procedural material imprinting, with what von Sturmer has recently identified as almost the opposite, in pottery works by Ngaanyatjarra women from the Mirlirrtjarra Ceramics Centre in Warburton. His argument is that because the earthenware employed by the women is not local clay—that they are literally “foreign” plates which come from elsewhere (Perth), they free the women from the kind of dictates I describe here—that is, they free the women from the injunction of the Law, the Dreaming, which ties inscription to the reproduction of sites, places, Ancestors. The pots are “empty vessels” for the invention and display of images generally, von Sturmer claims. That is, these pots are not imprintable surfaces, in the kind of terms I outline here. See J. von Sturmer, “Click go the Designs: Presenting the Now in 1000 Easy Pieces.” Warburton One and Only: Painted Earthenware by Women from the Mirlirrjarra Ceramics Centre, Warburton community, Central Australia, 14 May-1 June, 2002, Mori Gallery, Sydney, exh. cat.
- N. D. Munn, Walbiri Iconography: Graphic Representation and Cultural Symbolism in a Central Australian Society, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1986 (1973), 69.
- Warlpiri Lexicography Group, Warlpiri-English Dictionaries, Centre for Cognitive Science, Cambridge: Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1986, “Verbs”, 24.
- Indeed, the very condition of Jukurrpa—its constitutive repeatable form—must in fact be structured by, to borrow Derrida's framework, iterability. (See J. Derrida Of Grammatology, trans., Gayatri Chakrovorty Spivak. Baltimore and London: John Hopkins University Press, 1986). Despite the insistence on the immutable, timeless nature of Jukurrpa (the Dreaming, the Law), the imperative to repeat these inscriptions contemporarily must, arguably, be compelled by what is an instability ultimately in the constitutive terms of the Law, as I have argued elsewhere (see J. Biddle “The Warlpiri Alphabet” and “Inscribing Identity”). As we know from Butler (see J. Butler “The Psychic Life of Power”), the repetitious nature of the discourses on these subjects reveal, contrary to expectation, the very fragile nature of their constitutions. Why else the necessity to repeat if not for an inherent instability? This instability is undoubtedly heightened by the historical and concurrent conditions of European colonialism and dispossession.
- C. Nicholls, Genius of Place 30.
- All Central and Western Desert texts are, following this analysis, “palimpsests” in so far as they recreate an originary Ancestral imprintation that depends upon a “surface” with “depth” a “manuscript” primed for a “writing” that doesn't occlude “surface”. This palimpsest enables and ensures certain effects, as I outline here. Petyarre in this sense, simply attenuates what is a necessary condition of inscription. However, the importance of this attenuation of Ancestral potency in the contemporary political climate should not be underestimated.
- Yawulyu is the Warlpiri term for women's Dreaming ceremony; Awelye is the Anmatyerr term. I do not mean by using these terms interchangeably to do away with important distinctions between these two Central Desert cultures.
- My analysis here relies on Derrida's and now others (see E. H. Boone and W. D. Mignolo (eds), Writing without Words: Alternative Literacies in Mesoamerica and the Andes, Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1994) emphasis on the gramme, the graph, the glyph, the appreciation of writing as inscription—an appreciation which allows me to focus on writing as a material phenomenology itself. The difference “between” here that I describe is, of course, the very condition necessary for writing in Derrida's terms.
- B. Glowczewski, “Between Two Images,” in Yapa: Peintres Aborigenes de Balgo et Lajamanu, Paris: Baudoin lebon editeur, 1991, 117–123,121.
- E Dussart, “A Body painting in translation”, in M. Banks and H. Morphy, (eds), Rethinking Visual Anthropology, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1997, 192.
- B. Glowczewski, “Between Two Images,” 121.
- From the tide of Brenda L. Croft's paper “Kathleen Petyarre: I Feel Good in my Body When I'm Doing these Painting” cited in C. Nicholls, “Kathleen Petyarre.”
- C. Waston, “Touching the Land.”
- See F. Dussart, The Politics of Ritual in an Aboriginal Settlement: Kinship, Gender and the Currency of Knowledge, Washington and London: Smithsonian Institute Press, 2000, 75–76.
- The re-creation of country in the contemporary context includes an essential pedagogic function: the teaching about country which is no longer inhibited to children who may have no other access to country outside of these manifest presentations of it (see for example Warlukurlangu Artists Kuruwarri: Yuendumu Doors, Canberra: Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies 1987).
- E. S. Casey, “How to Get from Space to Place in a Fairly Short Stretch of Time: Phenomenological Prolegomena,” in S. Feld and K. Basso (eds.), Sense of Place, Santa Fe: School of American Research Press 1996, 13–52.
- C. Nicholls, Genius of Place, 10.
- P. Deutscher, “Three touches to the skin and one look: Sartre and Beauvoir on desire and embodiment,” in S. Ahmed and J. Stacey (eds), Thinking Through the Skin, London: Routledge, 2001, 143–159.
- J. von Sturmer, “Click go the Designs” (no page numbers indicated).
- S. Freud, “A Note Upon The Mystic Writing Pad,” On Metapsychology: The Theory of Psychoanalysis, trans. J. Strachey, London: Penguin Books, 1984 (1925), 429–434.
- J. von Sturmer, “R stands for… an extract from a Mabo Diary,” The Australian Journal of Anthropology 6 (1-2) 1995, 101–116, 102.
- By witness, I mean the culturally-specific and ontological sense that Basil Sansom evokes, that is, the determinative reliance on the other's presence and acknowledgment—the other's “witness”—to constitute an event as happening, as meaningful, as mattering. See B. Sansom, The Camp at Wallaby Cross: Aboriginal Fringe-dwellers in Darwin, Canberra: Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies, 1980.
- M. Merleau-Ponty, “The Intertwining: The Chiasm” in The Visible and the Invisible, trans. A. Lingis, Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1968, 130–155.
- L. U. Marks, The Skin of the Film: Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment, and the Senses, Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2000, 2. Marks is here characterizing “intercultural” cinema as marked by “hapdc visuality” but her analysis of the way in which this cinema of the displaced and diasporic operates in terms of inciting corporeal memories and history because of a necessarily traumic (post-colonial) relationship to memory and history, can well be extended to the work of Petyarre.
- By generosity here, I mean in the sense that Merleau-Ponty suggests but Ros Diprose develops: a corporeal open-ness to give of oneself in response to alterity. See M. Merleau-Ponty, “The Child's Relations with Others,” in J. Edie, (ed.), The Primacy of Perception and Other Essays on Phenomenologyical Psychology, and Philosophy of Art, History and Politics, Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1964; and R. Diprose Corporeal Generosity: On Giving with Nietzche, Merleau-Ponty and Levinas, New York: State University of New York Press, 2002. By hospitality, I mean to evoke the ontological willingness towards difference that Derrida explores in his recent work, see J. Derrida Politics of Friendship, trans. G. Collins, London: Verso, 1997.
- G. Deleuze and F. Guattari, Kafka: Towards a Minor Literature, trans. D. Polan, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986 (1975).
- Thanks to Vivienne Kondos for pushing me on this point.