Art Gallery of New South Wales, 2015
This review of the past century of indigenous art in Australia is completely fascinating. It may be limited by the fact that it is based on the collection of the Art Gallery of New South Wales, but that doesn’t diminish the depth and range of the arts portrayed. These include iconic and colourful dot paintings, naïve sketches and abstract landscapes, photojournalism and photo arts, woven crafts and carved funerary poles. Pieces are represented in full colour, often astonishingly vivid, with two pages and occasionally four devoted to each of over 100 artists. A sparse commentary briefly describes the artist’s history and touches on elements of his or her style and relation to traditional practices.
The greatest limitation on these reproductions is that they are contained
in a page size of 7.75 x 9 inches, while many of the artworks are two or more
metres tall. I remember vividly going into the Gallery in Sydney and standing
in front of a series of a dozen similar paintings that were at least two metres
tall. When the notes to a reproduction say that a piece is 185 x 465 cm, I have
to imagine the impact of a piece on that scale. And many of them are very large
in scale. I asked at the Sydney gallery shop if there were reproductions of the
lobby paintings, and was told that there were not. I bought this book as a
consolation, and it is a great one.
The book does not try to explain too much, but leaves it to the art
pieces to tell their story. The pieces are worth slow contemplative exploration.
It is an excellent parallel read to David Day’s Claiming a Continent. Day’s book gives the history of the sometimes
brutal Australian efforts to end the Aboriginal presence in Australia. This
book shows the strength, diversity and depth of the Aboriginal culture, as well
as the impact of colonial practices on them. Many of the paintings and
artefacts are representations of homelands and their importance to various
Aboriginal peoples. Sometimes they are places remembered or places in traditional
stories, but often they are real places represented in an abstracted style,
like the formal maps that we recognize in Euro-American cultures.
In spite of the limited text, the stories of the artists’ lives
frequently refer to their being displaced from traditional territories, their
alienation in an unwelcome environment, their economic struggles to survive
with their families, substance use issues, etc. Many of the artists reconnected
with their communities and their stories through artists’ collectives, learning
to express their connections to land, tradition and community through new media.
Several artists are respected keepers of traditional knowledge and ceremony,
and used their art to preserve and share their culture. Some also use it in an
activist way to advance land claims and traditional rights, and to point
criticisms at Australia’s colonial past and present. Interestingly, the book
notes that it was often the commercial media for which markets developed that
shaped the public expression of these arts, so what we see most reflects what
sells as much as the forms that the artists chose to use.
I learned also that many of the designs that appear abstract have very
distinct and clear meanings to the artists and their communities. The dots and
striped patterns, for example, may be taken from ceremonial patterns or body
painting styles that have been practiced for many generations, and they refer
to specific things, such as the patterns of grasses or bushes that grow in the
desert. Some represent dream scapes and celestial stories. These patterns
sometimes hold secret meanings that belong to one family and cannot be revealed
outside of the initiated. They are reinterpreted by contemporary artists,
sometimes simply through the use of new media and sometimes through the development
of new treatments that break away from tradition. I can only imagine the work
of applying paint in little dabs across such the large scale of many of these canvases.
I spent several months going through the few hundred
pages in this book, and hope to spend more time with the images. They also led
me to several websites where gorgeous reproductions can be found. Happily, it’s
been one of the more rewarding books I’ve read recently.
