I think that this will be my final post.

I just want to reflect a little bit on the course and some things that got me really excited about Indigenous Australian art - particularly the extremely wide range, which I had no idea even existed. I'm glad that we were able to cover such a large amount of information, even if only briefly, in this course - to acknowledge that it, indeed, has been and still is being created. I've always been attracted to Indigenous arts, particularly ancient Mesoamerican art. I think it will always amaze me that Aboriginal Australian art is being made in much the same way as it was when it first began. It really is one of the only cultures on this planet that retains it's traditional roots and continues to create images that much of contemporary culture not only respects, but revels in.

Exciting!

Edit: I just realized that I never posted about my trip to the Tandanya Gallery here in town. I went a couple of weeks ago because a classmate told me about the Jason Wing exhibition that was happening, which I found to be really interesting. He is a half Aboriginal and half Cantonese Australian artist focusing on his bi-culturality and the politics that go along with being an "outsider" in white Australia. The work was really engaging. It was the first time that I've been to the Tandanya, and I was happy to find a huge variety of work there, from contemporary to traditional paintings, sculpture, and installation work. Can't wait to go back and explore some more!

This week in the tutorial, we discussed the issue of ownership in Indigenous art. I had actually bookmarked this article to read and totally forgot about it, only to have it pop up in the tutorial discussion (which is a shame - I could have had much more to say).

The article talks about where exactly the money from the sales of Aboriginal art goes - which seems to be a mystery - and how new reforms hope to regulate how income is spent within an artist community. Interesting stuff...I don't really know how I feel about all of it, though. I'd like to hear some discussion of it from an Aboriginal artist's point of view.

So I've been doing some research on artists that I'm thinking about using for my final essay. I've found a billion and a half articles in the Australian that I can use (yay!) for sources, so I'm pretty happy about that.

Today this article popped up in my search for information on Vernon Ah Kee, and I realized that I had no idea what the Palm Island Riots were about....research time!

In 2004, Cameron Doomadgee, an Indigenous Australian, died in custody in the Palm Island Police Station. His was the 147th death of an Aboriginal in custody since 1990. Anyway, for obvious reasons, the public of Palm Island was outraged - the arresting officer is believed to beat him to death. That week, a riot erupted of about 400 people in which the courthouse, police station, and police barracks were burned down.

Ah Kee's cousin was one of the activists jailed for participating in the riots. His video piece, Tall Man, is compiled of footage of the events from mobile phones and news clips to create a twelve minute film of "a powerful narrative of an Aboriginal community that has become completely disenfranchised from a post-colonial Australia."

I read an article in the Sydney Morning Herald about Reko Rennie, a contemporary Indigenous artist from Melbourne - Rennie's work focuses on what it's like to be an urban Aboriginal man in contemporary society. He does stencil-based, graffiti influenced art that I'm actually pretty drawn to (this is not my usual cup of tea). Anyway, the article focused on a new neon piece (called "Neon Natives") located in a laneway in Melbourne.

"Neon Natives is not only about expressing his own heritage, but showing the broader population that contemporary Indigenous art is more complex than dots and ochre. 'A lot of people have this idea or notion of what contemporary Aboriginal art should be, and it's not the case,' he says, explaining that he tries to sway people from this by using very bright colours and materials. He also tries to educate about what it means to be an Indigenous artist in contemporary society. 'We aren't all dark with loincloths. There is this romanticised stereotype of the noble savage imagery. We are from different walks of life, different academic backgrounds and able to articulate ourselves. It's a really exciting time for contemporary Aboriginal art.'"

Found this article the other week about the Desert Mob show in Alice Springs. I have recently become really interested in finding articles about Indigenous art in newspapers and non-art periodicals to see what the different views are like.

An excerpt from the article:

"With so great a wealth of paintings and sculptural pieces on view, the spectator rushes to compare and judge. But the sheer profusion of the works, the totality of the exhibition, is its core message. The desert art centres are a managed, artificial archipelago, but the rich variation in the tapestry of the artworks they harvest makes a simple point. All through the desert inland, the show seems to murmur, this is going on. These multiple ways of conceiving and picturing the country still thrive. Along with the income management, poverty and abjection, this is also present. Make of it what you will. The remote communities are not just zones of crisis, then; they are also home to a strange, persisting renaissance. Consider Amata, a small collection of houses in the heart of desert range country and in years gone past a byword for petrol-sniffing chaos. It is now the home of Tjala, one of the region's most successful art centres. Large works by its painters dominate the main gallery of Araluen, and the key canvas is an elusive, hieroglyph-like emblem in reds, blues and deep orange and yellow colours by Wawiriya Burton, an old woman born in the bush and steeped in her traditions. She says next to nothing about the core subject matter of her work; there it hangs like a veil of beauty, something to be astonished by as much as something to gather up and own. It is striking how many of the most potent paintings in the exhibition are by men and women of senior standing in their ceremonial religious realms; how many, too, are by prominent healers. The most lyrical canvas in the show, Wati Ngintaka Tjukurpa (lizard man dreaming), by Harry Tjutjuna from Ninuku Arts is one example: a wash of loosely intermeshing colours -- reds, pale shades of ochre, pinks, purples and deep night-sky blues, in the midst of which the lizard figure, half-hidden, can be made out.

Here is both the wonder and challenge of the desert art-making tradition, caught by this show in its evolving flight. It embodies a distinct way of apprehending the landscape and this difference, which lends it consummate value for outside eyes, is what makes it almost impossible to decode and grasp. It is a tradition under dreadful threat: even the fact that it needs to be husbanded and preserved speaks of its weakness.

Can it be prolonged, and renewed? Can the tradition be passed on to younger artists, through instruction, workshops and all the other courses outsiders love to provide? Should it be? The masterworks with immediate appeal in Desert Mob 2011 are almost all by elderly artists -- figures such as Lily Hargraves from Lajamanu in the Tanami Desert, or Tommy Mitchell and Carol Golding from Warakurna Arts in Western Australia -- and this association of artistry with age is natural.

Painting, in Aboriginal communities with surviving deep culture and language, is linked with ceremonial knowledge systems that are passed on slowly through decades of instruction. Much of the work of cultural transmission goes on far beyond the realm of art centres and publicly funded schemes. Yet the art centre movement is widening its bid to preserve desert life-ways and a symposium held in concert with the opening of the exhibition reviewed the range of programs that have sprung up as part of this campaign."

This week, we're talking about Bell's Theorem...here is a quick lowdown on the topic.

Aboriginal art is not controlled by Aboriginal people.

It is effected by the following:

Western Art (example - Picasso's Les Demoiselles D'Avignon and the African masks).

Spirituality (non-Aboriginal "experts" and incorrect or incomplete interpretations).

Art Centres (a way for the government to control the industry that caters for Aboriginal art).

Two kinds of false experts of Aboriginal art - BINTS (Been In Northern Territory), bookees (who learn everything about Aboriginals from books).

Urban Aboriginal people "...have been consigned to the dustbin of history. Still we survive."

The Regional system (the classification of art based on geographical areas erected and maintained barriers between Aboriginal people).

The Native Title Act

Paternalism (Land rights).

Appropriations (Rights of an image - cultures are not for sale).

Anthropologists (knowledge - or lack of knowledge - about a culture they aren't part of).

Exploitation (of artists, culture, and traditional imagery).

Regulation (lack of; issues of the middleman when dealing art).

Stereotyping of Indigenous people (as drunks, homeless, useless).

Although I can't say that I'm terribly surprised to hear about all of these things, it still shocked me to see the extent of the exploitation that many Aboriginal artists are put through - this is a subject that has yet to grace the news in other countries (or at least, where I lived before moving to Australia), and which I believe needs to be known about. There are a lot of ways that some Aboriginal artists get screwed out of the money coming from their artwork, and it seems like there is little to no respect in some cases.

I found this article about Arnhem Land bark painter, Kay Lindjuwanga, whilst casually perusing my weekend newspaper. The article outlines her artistic family - her husband, John Maningrida, is famous for his use of rarrk or crosshatching, and her father, brothers, and daughter have all been influential practicing artists. Lindjuwanga won the Telstra prize in 2004 for her bark paintings, which are described as "lyrical...very fine in detail".

The article was pretty vague, but I thought it was nice, quick introduction to Lindjuwanga's art.

Spirit in the Land

So, this week I went to the Spirit in the Land exhibition at the Flinder's gallery on North Terrace - a pretty small gallery, but full of some beautiful Indigenous art. Here are some brief notes I took whilst visiting the gallery:

Rover Thomas

Gula Gula (Manking), 1989. This piece reflects the dance cycle undertaken by the spirit of Thomas' mother. She transmitted the songs and images to him through dreams - the paintings show her journey as a shade across the Kimberly landscape.

Bedford Downs, 1984. This painting is about the history of various massacres in East Kimberly, and shows the landscape using the "mapping" technique that Thomas is famous for.

Lorraine Connelly-Northey

This artist made Narrbongs (described as a string bag/waradgerie for the pouch of a marsupial) out of rusted wire, pressed tin, fencing, mesh, and iron paint. I found these particularly interesting with the play between traditional Aboriginal items made out of the ruins of modern white Australia.

Lin Onus

Jimmy's Billabong, 1988. Ginger and My Third Wife Approach the Roundabout, 1994. These works by Onus clearly reflect the gap between Indigenous and white Australia, addressing the country, culture, past, present, and combining traditional design and Western-Realist styles of painting.

John Davis

His sculptures have a focus on the fish - indicating the silent traveller or nomad of the river. The sculptures are made of twigs, thread, and calico.

Dorothy Napangardi

These paintings were particularly beautiful - expressing the sand dune patterns and salt lakes of the Tanami. The paintings are from an aerial perspective of the land.

Emily Kngwarreye

Kngwarreye's paintings reflect decades of applying women's ceremonial Awelye body markings, using the dusty reds and browns of the dry season in one painting and the greens, yellows, and pinks of the wet season in her other painting.

A common thread that I found with all of the work in the gallery was the relationship between the artist and the land - between the Indigenous and the white Australian land, the land before and after colonization.

I think the idea that a viewer of a different cultural background can never know the true meaning of an artwork is absolute rubbish. Yes, it may be difficult to extract specific implications or messages - but isn't art the universal language? We use art to express visually what we can't express verbally because of language barriers. It's about feeling, expression, community or individualism - can this not be reflected to a wide audience simply because we don't know everything about the culture?

I'm not a Christian, and in fact, I know pretty much nothing about Christianity - does this mean that I can't understand the work of the greats in the Renaissance like Leonardo or Raphael? No way! While the Australian Indigenous culture is a small one, it doesn't mean that I can't learn anything from it. If you don't understand something that you're attracted to, wouldn't you attempt to gain some knowledge about it?

Obviously, remote Aboriginal communities have been able to avoid Western influence - making Indigenous Australian art some of the most pure forms in the world, and hence, much of the attraction toward it - we are a world built on education of other cultures and histories. Many contemporary Australian artists incorporate Indigenous imagery into their works, however, because it's a way to break down or enhance the perception of these barriers. It's a way to attempt to bring different cultures together - this is not necessarily a good thing, but it's a method of understanding each other.

When we talk about the revitalization of Aboriginal art being the success story of modern Australian art, I don't even know how to think about it - Does this mean that Indigenous art is simply more abundant in the contemporary gallery? Or that it is flourishing more so that in Indigenous art's history? Was Aboriginal art ever lost?

Indigenous art has only been brought to the contemporary gallery for the past 30 years, but it is one of the the most ancient art forms on the planet. Does the fact that Indigenous art only recently came to the present day gallery mean that it wasn't appreciated by the Western culture before?

Aboriginal art sells three times as much as non-Aboriginal Australian art every year, yet - do the artists themselves see any of the benefit from the sales of the work? Are their communities really benefiting? Or are the artists simply being ripped off? Indigenous art has helped put Australian art on the market - Is the Westernized culture of Australia using Indigenous art as a platform to reach into the contemporary art world hubs like New York, Berlin and London?

Or, has Aboriginal art influenced modern Australian art made by non-Indigenous artists?

Perkins says modernity "erases the old with the new" and that Indigenous art is contradicting this idea - we are able to follow the path of Indigenous art from it's ancient origins through colonization and up until today. Traditional Aboriginal imagery and technique is still used in the contemporary work of Indigenous artists. Also, many Indigenous region's styles are melding together, keeping Aboriginal art ever-changing.

Okay, so I sat down and watched the Baz Luhrmann film "Australia" the other night with my aunt and uncle. After getting over the melodrama of it all, I realized that I really have no clue about any Australian history (unless you want to count my pitiful knowledge of the convict immigrants and the Stolen Generation - which, by the way, I only learned about within the past month of this course). I brought up this revelation during a conversation with a mate, and found that she didn't even know that Darwin had been bombed during WWII. I suppose that this information should make me feel a little bit better about my lack of Aussie historical knowledge (aka I'm not the only one who doesn't know these things), but it really only leads me to question why.

Anyway, I found some strong relationships between the segregation of African Americans in the U.S. and the Aboriginal community portrayed in the film - how the children of mixed races were affected is especially something that I really just find so completely inhumane. The idea of "breeding out" a race is absolutely disturbing. Despite my general uninterest in the film, there are some things that I'm going to take with me.

Just some thoughts.

One of the discussion points this week was artist Lin Onus and his ability to incorporate traditional Indigenous imagery into contemporary, political pieces. Onus uses political referents as well as current reflections of Australian culture (like his work with the Hill's Hoist and painted bats). Our class deliberated whether Onus's artwork was about loss or the reinvention of culture...my classmates and I discussed how Onus used a mocking tone towards the white Aussie society of today.

In the tutorial this week, our discussion group also talked about how (in the film from the lecture) Rover Thomas was able to look at a painting and sing the story that was being told - something that we all found so interesting. I suppose it's related to the Indigenous spiritual dreaming - something that only people who were raised in Aboriginal communities would understand. It's something that I find really engaging to think about.

The class tutorial exercise this week focused on the context of Indigenous-related artwork - Does the viewer need to know what political ideas are referenced in the work to be able to appreciate it?

I find myself asking this question about a lot of artwork, and that a lot of viewers, artists, and students answer with "The aesthetic gaze is just as important as the conceptual gaze!" This is something that I tend to have a hard time with - not all art is attractive. Actually, a significant amount of art is generally UNattractive, or even just uninteresting, unappealing. So, say you've got some unpleasant looking art that you don't understand the referent for - can you still appreciate it? Does appreciation only come from some sort of attraction or connection with the work?

The particular artists that this exercise looks at are Destiny Deacon and Ricky Maynard.

With Deacon's work, I don't believe that the viewer needs to know the specific political ideas to understand it (I find that these are implied by the directness of what's actually happening in the image), but that the viewer does need to know this information to fully appreciate it the way the artist probably intended the work to be seen (this is, obviously, an assumption).

When it comes to the photograph of Ricky Maynard in the ocean, I actually find my answer to be a little different - I think any image that projects a feeling of longing, searching, or loss is going to be powerful to viewers. It's something that is intimate; something that many, if not all, of us have experienced in one way or another. Knowing the context of work would bring the meaning to another level, of course, but the feeling is conveyed regardless.

Another artist I've been introduced to recently is Vernon Ah Kee - another Brisbane based, text-using contemporary Indigenous artist. What stands out to me about Ah Kee are his amazingly beautiful drawings and his ability to incorporate different mediums (text, drawing, video, sculptural elements) together with ease in his portraits.

"I'm expanding the idea of what it means to be Aboriginal and what it means to be human. A lot of the problem this country has with Aboriginal people is that it struggles to see Aboriginal people as fully human." (Taken from The Australian)

I've been looking into some contemporary Indigenous-Australian artists lately...I find the combination of traditional imagery and contemporary issues to be a really interesting basis for work - something very new to me, especially since I don't have the background knowledge of the Indigenous cultures like most Aussies do.

Anyway, a classmate turned me on to Tony Albert - a Brisbane based mixed media artist who uses text and imagery to create work that shows the political, historical and cultural issues between Indigenous people and white Australia today. A reoccurring word in his work is "Sorry", clearly referencing Kevin Rudd's apology to the Stolen Generations.

So, I bought this ring for $1 in Byron Bay from a shop claiming to be full of Aboriginal art and games. It's simple, made from bark with black and red painted patterns. I don't know how legit it was, but I like the ring regardless.

As an American in Oz, I must admit - I really have no clue about the Indigenous culture here. I'm going to assume that it's much like the Native American situation back home, but with a more ancient background and a more recent European takeover. So far, all I've learned is from Wikipedia and my fellow Aussie classmates...adding up to pretty much nothing, considering the prejudice many white Aussies have towards some of the struggling natives. I'm hoping this course will teach me some accurate history sans bias. Anyway, since it's my first post, I thought I'd begin with a fun topic - I went to see Dan Sultan (an Australian musician with Aboriginal backgrounds of the Arrernte and Gurindji people, and member of the Black Arm Band - a collection of Aboriginal musicians) play last week at a local venue. I guess Aussies call him the "black Elvis" of Australia because of his awesome soul-tastic voice - He mentioned this during the show and responded with "I'm no Elvis...I'm just Dan!" Anyway, here is a photo I snapped that night. It was a great show, by the way.