CIAF and Desert Mob 2010

This year’s Desert Mob is fast becoming the new Telstras (the Telstra National Aboriginal And Torres Strait Islander Art Award, affectionately dubbed the ‘Telstras’ or NATSIAAs), with a slick, increasingly ‘curated’ look and more and more satellite exhibitions popping up in the growing number of sophisticated galleries around Alice Springs.

Celebrating its twentieth year, Desert Mob has been going for nearly as long as the NATSIAAs and the two events have long been essential for anyone with an interest in Aboriginal art. Added to the August/September annual frenzy of indigenous art activity is the new Cairns Indigenous Art Fair, which this year continued along in fine form, although perhaps with less of an impact than it had the initial year.

This was due mainly to the removal of the director-curated exhibition, this year held at the Cairns Regional Art Gallery. Last year, this was included in the Tanks Art Centre, the wonderful (if humid) setting for the Fair, to great effect. Former IMA director John Snelling curated a concise, fresh and strong exhibition that included Vernon Ah Kee’s toilet doors installation, a powerful statement on Australian racism, from the Sydney Biennale and fellow proppaNOW collective artist, the multi-talented Tony Albert’s entire studio. The effect of the combination of work from these Brisbane-based artists with traditional basket weaving and unique ceramic sculptures from Albert’s elder relatives from Cardwell, combined with the brightly coloured paintings and sculptures from Aurukun and the striking black and white prints of the now famous Torres Strait Islander artists was fantastically striking and invigorating. It showcased the wonderfully broad range and high standard of much of Queensland art.

The lack of this exhibition inside the Tanks was felt. Also too, was the slip in quality from formerly top-level artists. In recent years to the concern of followers of initiators such as the Lockhart River Art Centre, standards have dropped remarkably. The pressure placed on successful artists can be shown in the lack of quality in their work, in a mirroring of the situation in Western Desert art, where, as one art centre manager bemoaned to me recently, winning the Telstras (the industry’s nickname for the prestigious Telstra National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander National Art Award) often signals the end of an artist’s career.

What may result from a win can be pure tragedy: humbugging from extended relatives, too much quick, easy money, unscrupulous dealers preying on the artist, unscrupulous dealers accepting relatives painting work, the artist feeling obligated to keep up with demand for work and accepting relatives working on paintings, or the artist simply not wishing to work any longer because of all of these factors. The situation is comparable to anyone who finds fame too quickly, and cannot deal with it, yet is exacerbated due to the complex societal obligations inherent within Indigenous culture, and the pressure of poverty.

Artists such as Mornington Island’s Sally Gabori are still producing many works of varying quality. Former Lockhart stars Rosella Namok and Samantha Hobson continued to produce good works once leaving the art centre they had established and worked with those who initially fostered their career. The artists remaining at Lockhart, judging by their stands at the two CIAFs, are producing paintings of lesser quality.

And yet, what continues my interest in this art is its incredible phoenix-like ability. What keeps visitors to the Telstras and Desert Mob is to see the new art centres and artists emerge, as well as the elder stars continue to shine. Unlike much of Western art, staleness rarely exists across the broad sweep of indigenous art. Whilst it may occur within an art centre or community, there is also an ingenious ability for rebirth. Artists such as George Tjungurrayi and Ronnie Tjampitjinpa, for example, regularly lose their way, only to come back with powerhouse optical painting that would require many Western artists an army of studio assistants, not to mention tools including computers, to deliver.

What did deliver at CIAF this year, amongst a fairly dull range of symposiums and talks, was the premiere of the proppaNOW documentary. A slickly produced film with a DIG-esque introduction to the artists collective of seven (once eight, no mention was made of former member Andrea Fischer) of some of Brisbane’s most interesting artists as superhero cartoon characters was informative and lively, funny and at times, particularly when focusing on indigenous Noosa area artist Bianca Beetson, moving.

proppaNOW artists such as Richard Bell would do well to continue along this path of having well-made films and documentaries made on them and their careers, rather than merely shooting from the lip. Events such as CIAF would do well to continue to include these films in their programmes.

This year’s Desert Mob was another example of the ability for regeneration amongst Indigenous artists. Those few fortunate enough to either be closely involved with this art or to travel the remote outposts of this country have lauded the art from the NPY lands, the art centres that now number fourteen (with the exception of the non-Desart run Irrunytju Art Centre) from across the Ngaanyatjatjara, Pitjantjatjara and Yankunytjatjara people’s lands of South Australia, Northern Territory and Western Australia, for some time.

Yet recently there have been claims that the glory days of this art movement are over, and the work being produced now is not what it was. For a painting movement that only began in a concerted way post-2001, this must surely have been one of the quickest trajectories and subsequent crashes in artistic history.

The Desert Mob exhibition this year largely defies these statements, although evidence can be seen of art centres that are not producing the stunning visual work they once were.

The most outstanding works from the NPY lands in the exhibition included works from the Ernabella, Amata, Warakurna, Kaltjiti, Mutitjulu and Nyapari communities.

Stand-out pieces included a large Dickie Minyintiri painting from Ernabella Arts, a sublime exercise entitled Wati wilu-ku inma Tjukurpa. Consisting of a background of deep reds, ochre yellows and cobalt blues over which the artist has painted a batik-like decoration of white and pale yellow lines and shapes, concentric and wheel-shaped circles, leaf shapes and Matissian Arabesque forms. To use a palette consisting mainly of white is a challenge for any artist, and Minyintiri manages this with confidence and capability.

Several exciting new painters have emerged from Ernabella, showing that this community, once famous for its craft, contains some serious painting talent also. Pepai Carroll, the community’s former long-serving policeman, has only been painting for the past year. The husband of well-known fabric artist and potter Alison (Milyika) Carroll, he hails originally from Haasts Bluff, and paints his father’s Pintupi country, which lies further west. His painting entitled ‘Walungurru’ (Kintore) is of this Western desert area a fair distance from his Ernabella home. It showed a deep engagement with family history and stories told to the artist long ago, as a boy growing up in Haasts Bluff.

Other strong work from Ernabella included paintings by Gordon Inkatji and the always whimsical and bold Nura Rupert.

As the flocks of collectors and art dealers who come to Desert Mob know: every Desert Mob is important. For it is really only here that you see the latest developments in desert art. The new art centre that has flourished within the space of the past twelve months, the new artist that has just picked up a paintbrush, you cannot learn this all in Sydney, Melbourne or Perth. You must wait until the exhibitions come up later on this year, or the next, or the next.

If you want to know, go to Desert Mob. More so than Western art, Aboriginal art has the unique position of the ability to create vastly speeded meteoric career rises, due to the traditional practices of ceremonial painting. Decades of artistic, historical, mythological, botanical, geographical and cultural knowledge and practice are often hidden behind a canvas that may have been the first one that artist has produced.

This year, that new exciting art centre was undoubtably Mimili Maku. Artists in the northern South Australian Pitjantjatjara community of Mimili have been attempting to establish an arts centre since 1985. They have travelled to other communities and studied the techniques of batik and other craft, and later one, painting. They have also observed the techniques used to establish an art centre. Now, with a burst of energy, they have begun a painting project, through workshops with artist Wayne Eager, that is drawing comparisons from seasoned art dealers to the legendary outpouring of genius that was Emily Kame Kngwarreye. Like Kngwarreye’s early works, the paintings are sublime, sophisticated, authentically raw, and inexpensive. The mother and daughter Ngupulya Pumani and Milatjari Pumani are already the superstars of the centre, but there is other serious talent here too. The other Pumani, Betty, is equally talented. The delicate, feminine work of Tuppy Goodwin. The masculine colour line work of Willy Martin. The evocative use of rich reds and magenta by Mike Williams.

Like the National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art Award, Desert Mob is now a major art event with satellite private gallery exhibitions popping up around it. The stand-out show this year was in the newly located Raft Artspace, moved south from Darwin into a large warehouse in the outskirts of central Alice. The Mimili Maku works, sublime with their fine, shimmering dots, layers of abstracted imagery, warm reds, pinks and whites, and powerful cultural foundations were the bargain paintings of the year. Any art collector who was not present at this exhibition failed to pick up the best deal going in art in a long time. These works will come to be considered amongst the top echelon of Aboriginal fine art, to be seen only in our state and national galleries. Indeed, Judith Ryan, the NGV’s indigenous art curator, was in attendance to open the exhibition, which she did with a palpable amount of passion and joy.

Tiger Palpatja, who was represented by Tjala Arts at Amata but now works with Tjungu Palya, has been a consistently powerful painter for the past few years. His exploration of the Piltati myth, a major story of his region, continued in his Desert Mob painting: large and powerful, using his trademark hot and soft pinks to great effect. His work exists in the memory as a powerful memento from this exhibition: it symbolises all that is great and enduring about this art.