Interview with Apolline Kohen

Apolline Kohen

interviewed by Emily McCulloch Childs

for Aboriginal Art Magazine, first issue, 2009

During her time as Director at Maningrida Arts & Culture, Apolline Kohen managed to combine co-ordinating some 25 exhibitions a year with running the art centre and the Djómi Museum, the regional museum that acts as the custodian for the area’s cultural and historical material. She also initiated several important exhibitions, including the major survey show Crossing Country, at the Art Gallery of New South Wales in 2004 and the retrospective of John Mawurndjul, <<rarrk>>, at the Museum Tinguely in Basel and the Sprengel Museum in Hanover in 2005. In 2008 she became the acting director at the Museum and Art Gallery of the Northern Territory (MAGNT) in Darwin.

I spoke to Apolline in her home in Darwin from my studio at Shoreham on a Sunday afternoon.

EMC: What did you do in Paris, before you came to Australia?

AK: I studied in Paris and left for Australia two days after completing my diploma at the Ecole du Louvre and my specialisation in Oceanic Art at the then Musée des Arts d’Afrique et d’Oceanie (MAAO, now Musée du quai Branly). I was eager to learn more about Aboriginal art and the only way at the time to further my knowledge in this field was to go to Australia. I ended up in Canberra at the National Museum of Australia (NMA).

EMC: What impact did the Magiciens de la Terre exhibition, the 1989 Paris exhibition organised by the Centre Georges Pompidou, have on your life?

AK: Magiciens de la Terre was a landmark exhibition that challenged me as a teenager interested in art.  It opened my mind to other contemporary art practices happening outside my European culture or America. It triggered emotions I had never experienced before. I was a bit familiar with African art through Picasso’s work, but had no idea about contemporary art practices from Asia, Oceania, let alone Indigenous Australia. When I decided to study art history, I chose to specialise in Oceanic art as I was aesthetically and emotionally drawn to these art expressions. Unfortunately, Aboriginal art was only a small component of the curriculum but it gave me the idea to go to Australia.

EMC: You have said of Karel Kupka, the Paris-based Czech artist, collector and writer whose collection of superb barks are housed in Paris, that ‘he was the first to recognise the individuality of each artist’1. How did Kupka influence you in your appreciation of Aboriginal art?

AK: I was fortunate to have access to the Kupka Collection while I was at the MAAO. I also admired Kupka’s approach and work given the then view most people had on Aboriginal art, he approached Aboriginal art from an artist’s perspective not as an anthropologist – quite revolutionary at the time. I loved the art of Arnhem Land, but I would not say that it’s entirely because of this bark collection that I came to have a passion for bark painting. I first went to Australia in 1994 for my honeymoon and we spent most of our time going to galleries looking at as much Aboriginal art as we could. It almost became an obsession. This made us want to come back, hence the decision to come in 1996 to live in Australia for a year. We never left…

EMC: What is it that so moves you about Aboriginal art?

AK: The aesthetic sense that you see in works by artists such John Mawurndjul, Rover Thomas, Kitty Kantilla, Yala Yala Gibbs and Makinti Napanangka. I think they all have in common this burning desire of communicating the power and beauty of their land and it must resonate with me.

John Mawurndjul, Ancestors at Milmilmingkan, 1994, ochre on bark, 168 x 110 cm. Private collection. Courtesy Maningrida Arts & Culture and Joel Fine Art.

EMC: How did you feel when you first arrived at Maningrida?

AK: I first came to Maningrida in 1998 while I was working for the NMA and had no idea before I arrived at Maningrida airport what sort of community it would be. I came with an open mind, with no preconceptions. I am adaptable, so nothing came as a shock. At first, the hardest was not to be able to source my favourite coffee and food – not a big drama.

EMC: What was your experience like working with these artists, and bringing Mawurndjul to your own ‘country’, Paris?

AK: That was my favourite part of the job. To be honest, I loved working with some artists but not all – we all have our preferences and personalities. I most loved working with those who were not only talented but also very professional. I travelled with many artists, you develop either friendships or cold relationships on trips as it quite taxing to spend all your time with someone you barely know for days. John has taken me to special places on his clan lands so I was very happy to be able to show him my country and culture. We had great times together and he knows Paris better than many Australians as he has been to Paris five times with an ex-Parisian as travelling companion. I treasure lots of memories and stories from these trips.

EMC: Having visited Paris in 2007, I found John Mawurndjul’s installation in the bookshop at the Musée de quai Branly an inspiring, accessible way to present Aboriginal art –where the general public can view it, rather than the offices, where the Ningura Napurrula artwork and others are installed. How did you and Mawurndjul plan this installation?

AK: It was quite a coup to get John’s work in the bookshop, it was also a challenging task! John worked really hard on the column. His concentration is exceptional and he could paint non-stop for 12 hours while myriad journalists were coming through. It was truly mad. We had to come back to Paris as we were not satisfied with the ceiling plan and proposed style of execution. John ended up supervising himself in a -5C environment. I became the facilitator. We both worked hard but enjoyed every minute of it. John’s dedication and professionalism paid off as the result is quite remarkable and we have been getting some really good feedback. We did celebrate in style when we finished this project!

Sonia Payes,  John Mawurndjul,  C-type photograph,  2006,  127 x 127 cm,  Ed 10,  Curtin University Art Collection

EMC: You had great success with commercial exhibitions of barks, lorrkon, the large poles, and fibre. Was this a challenge?

AK: A well-prepared bark has more chances of lasting than some of the badly prepared canvasses I sometimes see on the market. A bark has a beautiful unique texture, which is part of the artwork itself. Sculptures, lorrkon, are easy to sell as when collectors have no wall space left in their house, they can always find an empty corner for a sculpture…it’s all about quality of the art, not the medium. Some people say fibre is ephemeral but I don’t see this as a problem. We collect and buy artworks because we love them. Is it really that dramatic to think that it might not last forever? Who cares? People have to learn to enjoy things and not always think of an investment that will last for generations. It is all about changing people’s perceptions and playing on emotions when you sell art. As long as it is good art and you’re good at communicating your passion for an artist, you will succeed. Remember we have seen art dealers selling empty walls in the 1950s with Yves Klein.

John Mawurndjul, Lorrkon, Collection NGA

EMC: You’ve been quoted as saying ‘From my experience in Maningrida, it’s been very good being French…because they think I’ve got a culture as well.’2 Did the artists react differently to you because you were French than if you were Australian?

AK: I think it made my life easier as I did not have the baggage that some Australians have toward Aboriginal issues. I had no preconceptions about Aboriginal culture and no guilt about how Aboriginal people have been treated by white Australians. I just interacted with artists in the same way I would have done with anyone. And I always refused to play the race card.

EMC: How did you find living and working in an Aboriginal community, where people are still engaged with their cultural traditions, and art centre managers are able to witness ceremonies and the like quite often?

AK: It is fantastic to see that ceremonies and cultural practices are very alive and play an important part in people’s lives. I enjoyed being able to witness some cultural practices but never felt the urge to be part of it. I have seen too many white people desperately wanting to be ‘initiated’. I feel sorry for these guys…

John Mawurndjul, Mardayin, ochre on bark, Collection NGA

EMC: You took Maningrida art to Europe and the Middle East. Do you think appreciation for Aboriginal art is growing internationally?

AK: I strongly believe that appreciation of Aboriginal art is growing at an international level. However, this needs to be nurtured. I urge the Australian government to support and fund more exhibitions to tour overseas, especially from public art institutions. I feel that Museum curators and Directors have a role to play there.

EMC: Has your passion for Aboriginal art changed your perception of contemporary art that you might see on your return to Europe?

AK: Of course, yet I regard Aboriginal art as one of the interesting contemporary art movements at the moment but I am also interested in artists such as Tracey Emin, Yinka Shonibare, and Zadok Ben David.

EMC: In 2007 you implemented the Aboriginal Art Fair in Darwin, run to coincide with the National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art Award (NATSIAA). Why did you decide to start the Fair?

AK: I felt that there was room within Darwin for arts centres to promote their works while most collectors, curators, and art critics are in town for the art awards. And it worked.

Lena Yarinkura, Group of 5 Dogs, 2008,  ochre on fibre,  from the Menagerie exhibition, Object Gallery

 

EMC: In 2008 you became acting director of MAGNT and instantly had the difficult task of co-ordinating the NATSIAA, Australia’s largest and most important indigenous art award, in its 25^th ‘Silver Jubilee’ year. How did you find this?

AK: It was particularly challenging as I just started in the job when the ‘silent protest’ started.

It is also always hard to step in when a project has already started as you always feel that you may have done a few things differently. Hopefully, I have learned a lot from it and the 2009 Award will be a walk in the park in comparison. We’ll do a few things differently this year in terms of the event and selection of works etc. Additionally, I had to deal with some very bad news in my private life, so I will always have mixed feelings when thinking of the 25^th Silver Jubilee.

EMC: The ‘silent protest’ you mention: seven art centres pulled out of the award in protest of the inclusion of Irrunytju Art Centre, whose advisor John Ioannou also operates a city-based commercial gallery. You broke your silence on this and have welcomed open discussion.3 I find such openness refreshing in an industry that thrives on gossip. How do you think the Aboriginal art world is responding?

AK: I believe in open communication and I am sick of the constant gossiping in the art world. This drove me to run the forums and discuss issues with key players in the arts industry. The benefit has been that people realised through our discussions how important the award has been in the development of Aboriginal art. It is easy to criticise the award, but without it many artists would not be where they are now. This is not to say that we should not try to make it even better. No one came with revolutionary ideas but some good comments were made and we will certainly take some into account. For example, this year, the judges will be involved in the preselection as well as the final judging. I think that was a very good suggestion so we took it on board.

EMC: Aboriginal art led you to Australia; having lived here now for some years, do you think of it as your home?

AK: Yes, Australia is my home now but I do need to be able to visit Paris regularly as my family and some dear friends live there. I am Franco-Australian and my goal is to enjoy as much as I can the best of both worlds!

Further reading:

http://www.smh.com.au/news/arts/artists-stories-will-live-on-forever-in-paris-museum/2005/09/09/1125772690196.html

1 Kohen in Michael Fitzgerald, ‘A Parisian Romance’, Time Magazine, 15 May 2006.

2 Kohen in Michael Fitzgerald, ‘A Parisian Romance’, Time Magazine, 15 May 2006.

3 Ashleigh Wilson, ‘Indigenous art awards furore prompts changes’, The Australian, August 7, 2008 and Kohen has since run forums in Alice Springs and Darwin inviting art centres to share ideas.

Texta Dreams: I’m Hunting and Pecking: Feed Me Your Troubles, Arlene TextaQueen and Olivia Edith, Seventh Gallery, 2007

First appeared in The Art Life, 2007

Arlene Textaqueen, Somethings never change (Leah), 2007, felt tip on paper

I am lying on an old golden velvet couch, dreaming. I am in a far away land, with swirls of bright light, where everything is light and airy. There are women who are not so much solid forms of flesh but curlicues of whites, pinks, pale greens and golds, they float around me as light as lace. A voice is making a melodious sound. It sounds like Coleridge’s Abyssinian maid, high and clear. I can’t decipher what it is saying; and I don’t want to, it is too nice to be on this couch, in a warehouse in the city of Melbourne, fast asleep with my white lights and pretty pink swirls. But the voice grows more insistent, and comes closer, and I realise it isn’t saying ‘misty’, as I thought, which went nicely with my magical world, but ‘Christie’, the name of my friend upon whose couch I am sleeping.

It isn’t from within my dream, but outside, in the lane. It is the voice of Keg, the sister of the artist Arlene TextaQueen, whose felt-tip drawings have infiltrated my dreams. The swirls are the arabesque lines from her drawings, her palette supplies the colours. Her work has somehow seeped quickly into my sub-conscious.

Keg, who is also an artist, is staying in the warehouse, and she has returned home after seeing The Slits play at The Corner and needs to be let in. And she has a voice that somehow reflects her sister’s drawings, even whilst yelling up to a warehouse from a dirty laneway at 2 am on a school night.

Earlier that evening we had been at Seventh Gallery, one of Melbourne’s most popular artist run spaces. Situated on Gertrude St, Fitzroy, it is in the heart of Melbourne’s  contemporary art world, across the road is Dianne Tanzer Gallery, down the street, Gertrude Contemporary. TextaQueen’s exhibition there was held in conjunction with her penpal, American artist Olivia Edith.

Arlene Textaqueen, If I ever go to another social engagement…, 2010, felt tip on paper 76.5 x 111.5cm

Arlene TextaQueen is an artist intent on keeping the genre of The Nude alive. She has taken an art form previously relegated within Australian art to Lindsay’s ‘galumphing nudes’, still bought by businessmen for the purposes of private titillation in their offices, and dragged it kicking and screaming into the present. She has blithely and cleverly ignored the limitations of the academy and gone about courageously drawing life models in her own distinctive style. By doing so, she has intentionally recaptured the nude female form away from the male gaze, and broken with the traditions of the ‘chaste nude’, exemplified by artists such as Janet Cumbrae Stewart. She has brought the nude into a more inclusive, yet fantastical world.

Arlene Textaqueen, I shouldn’t have put it there to tempt you (Dana), 2005 felt tip on paper 77 x 112cm

TextaQueen has neatly side-stepped O’Keefe’s financial concerns by drawing her friends and contemporaries, which works in her favour, as the drawings all have an intimacy and personality which lets the viewer feel in on a secret. It’s like you’ve been invited into her lounge room, there’s a female MC, there’s a female performance artist, and they are friendly and offer you a cup of tea with organic honey. Or maybe vodka.

She brings this aspect to her exhibition openings also, I have memories of her opening at Gertrude Contemporary in 2003, where there were two naked young ladies covered in tinned spaghetti, with TextaQueen drawing them, oblivious to the crowd around her. At Seventh that she had repeated this performance, complete with her TextaQueen outfit that makes her look like an Art Superhero, so that the viewers at her openings are invited into the lounge room with her, and the opening becomes a three-dimensional performance art created here, now, rather than just 2-dimensional drawings created in an unknown ‘studio’ space.

And the drawings themselves are distinct and appealing. They are colourful yet contain enough white space not to fall into garishness, they fuse a naive, almost child-like style of drawing and perspective (often TextaQueen’s figures have oversized heads, for example), with an understanding of the human form. They are social documentations of interesting, talented and strong women who are rarely documented.

Arlene Textaqueen, There’s always a sacrifice, 2010, felt tip on paper 111.5 x 76.5cm

What I particularly enjoy about them is their inclusion of text; the artist, Kahlo-like, includes a line that gives the viewer some indication of the personality or life of the sitter. Often witty, or humourous, perhaps they cheat a little in opening up that person’s life to us through the direct access of words, whereas traditionally a portrait painter would have to rely purely on imagery to do the same, but I nonetheless applaud the idea. Mostly it’s because I love the lines themselves, which are always taken from the conversation between the artist and her model. And with the proliferation of text-based art around us, I see no reason why the artist cannot fuse images with words, even in a previously conservative genre such as portraiture. Or perhaps especially in a previously conservative genre such as portraiture.

TextaQueen’s fantastical world is a joy and delight to view, believe me, it’ll give you better dreams.

Arlene Textaqueen is now represented by GallerySmith, Melbourne and Sullivan + Strumpf, Sydney. Flickr here.

Interview with Ben Frost

Ben Frost: Interview
Originally appeared in  The Scene 2007

Ben Frost, Quick Draw, 2006, acrylic and aerosol on board,  25 x 20 cm.

Ben Frost’s paintings have taken collage and pop art into the next era, that is: now. A kaleidoscope of skewed Disney images and brand names compete with horror elements to create a visual cacophony of a world gone mad, where ratings and sales figures matter more than true emotions or genuine relationships.
Frost has taken on all the Big Cheese Companies, from Burger King to Lego, fusing their logos with images taken from our childhood: Hello Kitty, Bambi, Snow White and The Simpsons all feature, albeit in a distorted fashion, in Frost’s world. He has cleverly reminded us of how labels and brand names are taught early, and thus how much our lives are in fact carefully constructed by marketers wanting us to buy their products.
I interviewed Ben Frost by email from an internet café with dial-up in a sleepy village lying at the foothill of the Scottish Highlands, en route from the London Book Fair to visit my family’s Clan McLeod home of the Isle of Skye. Slowly my questions filtered through to Frost’s Sydney studio in sunny Surrey Hills. This was our exchange.

Ben Frost, Dawn of the Dead, 2007, acrylic and aerosol on board, 120 x 120 cm.

EMC: Tell me about your title image for the exhibition, ‘Dawn of the Dead’. What I loved about is that you have Lurch from The Addam’s Family with ‘MySpace’ scratched into his forehead. I have a friend who believes that MySpace is the work of Satan. Perhaps it is perpetuating our zombie-ism to a degree, and of course it was recently acquired by the Murdoch empire, so is now just a part of another major corporation. And of course it provides a wonderful tool for gathering information about us (I found scary evidence of this in a BBC article “And most importantly, Myspace has detailed logs of its users’ preferences, online behaviour and personal information”. Is this referenced in this work of yours?

BF: This was today’s television program content of ‘Mornings’ with Kerry Anne Kennerly April 18^th, 2007 9.20 a.m to 9.50 a.m : 80 year old woman starts smoking, Is your man a metrosexual?, Lose weight with the Magic Bean Deluxe, Virginia college student kills 32 fellow students, Food prices set to skyrocket due to Australia’s greatest water shortage on record, commercial for window cleaning product, commercial for juicing machine, Debate on adoption rights for celebrities, Should Britney’s mother be blamed for her bizarre behaviour?, commercial for cheap home loan, commercial for life insurance, commercial for caravan and camping supershow, news update on reasons why Virginia college student kills 32 fellow students, commercial for Australia’s Funniest Home Videos.

I listen to all of this in the background whilst viewing Myspace on the internet. During the day, Myspace has more ‘upbeat’ content – this morning I notice advertising pop-ups in this order: Free ring tone, animated commercial for a ‘listening lounge’ sponsored by a vodka company, Free ring tone, Lady with large breasts offering free t-shirts, the new Spiderman movie, Free ring tone, New energy drink, Broadband special offer, Free ringtone, Cheap ring tone, Ski in New Zealand, Free ring tone.
I often have to wipe the dribble from my chin as my brow extends and I groan like a zombie, but I’m not feeding on brains, I’m feeding on friend requests and revolutionary new weight-loss programs.  This is only the first half hour of my day and my eyes have already glazed over from the constant technicolour barrage of banality that looks more grey with every mouse click.
Like Frankenstein’s monster we have become undead – neither contributing nor being provided anything of value, aimlessly participating in a vast advertising campaign that thinly masquerades as entertainment.

EMC: Your latest artist’s statement describes nightmares, the paranormal and other such matters. I was interested to read your experience of the ‘Old Hag’, which you describe as “a troublesome event where one awakes in the middle of the night unable to move or call out whilst a feeling of evil and dread fills the room”. You say you have suffered from this from childhood into your adult life.

How does your art provide an expression for this? Do any worries and anxieties go out into your art, then perhaps back into your mind? Or are you perhaps capturing a mass fear of where we are on this planet right now and where we are heading?

Ben Frost, The Fear, 2006, acrylic and aerosol on board, 20 x 25 cm.

BF: I’m definitely trying to capture a sense of hysteria in my work.  The way the media whips up perceived threats and fears from terrorism, oil shortages, bird flu, incompetent doctors, ice epidemics and nuclear war, sometimes it seems safer to stay in bed with a cup of tea.

With our current level of globalization our world is presented to us in an interwoven tabloid form where everything works on extremes. Extreme weather conditions in America that are the ‘biggest’ and the ‘worst’ juxtaposed with extreme children’s programs where the characters are the ‘cutest’ and their associated toy range are the most ‘fun’ and ‘entertaining’.

If we weren’t so desensitized, every day would be this rollercoaster of amazement, ecstasy and sorrow that would leave us completely exhausted by nightfall.
But what is the answer to all this?  There isn’t.  We have devolved into mindless consumerists that tout freedom by force, our understanding of freedom dictated to us during commercial breaks of Big Brother (Ten Network, Mon-Fri, 6 till 6.30, live evictions every Sunday night at 7.30).

EMC: You have talked about appropriation before, which is a really hairy issue in the art world. You’ve said that you liked the side of it as being  “kind of like a ‘fuck you’ to art and the supposed preciousness of it” (Ben Frost, interview, Chief Magazine, Issue 4, 2006). Most of your work involves appropriation of brand names and images, which I think, considering how much they have been forced down our throat, it’s about time artists started messing with this imagery. But where would you draw the line at appropriation? How do you feel about copyright issues? Would you, say appropriate another artist’s work?


BF: Culture jamming brings the power back to the individual, in a world where the individual feels more leadership from corporations than it does their own governments.  People buy what they are told, but they won’t do what they are told.  There is then this perceived sense of fear that the Special Branch of the Kellogg’s Squad is going to raid an artist’s studio to confiscate the highly illegal use of the words ‘Corn Flakes’ in a painting, where the letter ‘C’ in ‘Corn’ has been replaced with the letter ‘P’.  I can just see Snap, Crackle & Pop dressed in head to toe leather with oversized handcuffs and big colourful batons knocking the beret off the poor shocked painter.

I do appropriate other artist’s work and I think there has always been a great tradition of this.  But I don’t go sifting through the work of my peers.  I most often lift and manipulate artwork from obscure sources like old sixties comic books.

Ben Frost, Portrait of GG Allin, 2007, acrylic on canvas, 120 x 90 cm.

EMC: In an interview you said that you were inspired by Julian Opie, Warhol, Jamie Reid, Ron English, Robert Williams, all the Judge Dredd/2000AD comic artists. I am most interested in the last reference, the 2000 AD comic artists. How do you think they have influenced your work?

BF: 2000 AD was such an amazing and revolutionary tome of the fantastical and the absurd.  Stories like Judge Dredd, whilst telling macho stories for young boys, had this British comedic sensibility where everything was tongue in cheek and bizarre.  It was set in this future world where Judge Dredd had to cruise about keeping the order in the out-of-control, overpopulated and media influenced world, that in retrospect was really quite prophetic.  I remember this funny story called ‘the fatties’  where every year scores of morbidly obese people would gather for a type of overweight Olympics. The fatties would compete in sports such as fast-eating and sprinting (with various ‘gut-barrows’ to help them along) – which is not much different from any episode of ‘The Biggest Loser’ really.
I think as a young boy, 2000 AD drew me into drawing superheroes, which realistically started me into art, and the way they presented the future I guess I’ve always stayed linked to this idea of our own future and how ridiculous and bizarre it’s going to be – if it isn’t already.

Ben Frost, Let’s Be Friends, 2007, acrylic and aerosol on board, 120 x 120 cm.

EMC: I am interested in how your work combines images of sex and horror, even gore. I suppose I would read this as a way of commenting on the ways in which women’s bodies are used to sell, the ways in which, despite the (3) feminist movements, sex still ‘sells’. Or is it something different?

BF: I have the constant urge to paint naked women and guns.  At first I thought it was because I am a man – which I think has a lot to do with it, but there is also a huge element of indoctrination involved.  My process of art making involves sifting through countless images, whether they are on the internet, in magazines or in comics and in these forums the depiction of women is almost always the same.  In comic books, the female is the ‘innocent’ in magazines a ‘commodity’ and on the internet, a desirable ‘object’. I play with these representations and mix genres to create surreal dialogues that bring to the surface more darker consumerist motivations.

EMC: You’ve described your paintings for your new exhibition as “punk-pop mash-up”. Which sounds more like a band description than an art one. Excuse me for asking the old question about music influencing your work, but seeing as you actually are in a band (Danger of Death), does it and how so?


BF: My first exhibition I did when I got back from living in Japan was painted over a 4 month period listening solely to a band called Arab On Radar.  After first listening to one of their albums I committed myself to try and paint in that style of music, which I pretty much did.  Their stuff has a nervous frenzied, math-rock kind of style, with perverse poetic lyrics.  I lifted some of their song lyrics to name some of my paintings at the time like ‘Judy Garland Never Wore Tampons’ and ‘Yahweh or the Highway’.  I like using words and titles, and music has that ability to explain things in a way painting can only ever come close to.
I look at my artwork as being punk, and I extend that to my contribution to my band Danger of Death.  It’s fun to express yourself to a beat, get in fights on stage and generally make everything that I’m about in a more performative and physical form.

Ben Frost, Yahweh or The Highway, 2006, acrylic and aerosol on board,  120 x 120 cm

Ben Frost, Exxon, Painted rubber duck, 2006.

EMC: I saw somewhere recently, I think it was the school’s test on some tabloid tv show, like Today Tonight, that children can now spell brand names better than they can the names of items of clothing. I think your work alerts us to this fact, although you probably examine the issue with a bit more complexity than tabloid tv shows do.


BF: I’m obsessed with Today Tonight and A Current Affair – they are the best shows on television, and I get totally annoyed they are on at the same time, because I don’t know which one to watch.  It’s like watching Bill O’Reilly on Fox News – he’s so repulsive and you can hardly keep from gagging on your own vomit, but there’s a type of message that is being broadcast that you don’t see with as much passion anywhere else.
I think I remember this program about the kids, and I think they had another spin on it where the kids now who Ronald McDonald was but not John Howard.  It relates to the power that the corporations have attained as the real seats of government.  Politicians are so damn boring.  Though they weren’t like this in the 80’s.  Mikael Gorbachev, Ronald Reagan, Bob Hawke and Margaret Thatcher were all in power at the same time – and despite their points of view at least they had some charisma.  It’s quite possible that our current leaders are dressed by the corporations to look old and dull, so as not to draw any attention away from the tampon commercials.

EMC: Being interested in ephemeral art and projects such as Peter Hill’s imaginary ‘Museum of Contemporary Ideas’, I was fascinated to read that you faked your own death in 2000. Unfortunately it coincided with the death of an art world luminary. I was overseas at the time and missed all the hoo-hah, has the art world(s) forgiven you yet? Is it part of an ongoing project that you are going to continue, I can see a theme here…is your upcoming exhibition  ‘Dawn of the Dead’ Ben Frost returning as a zombie?

BF: When I faked my death, the newspapers picked up on it and thought I really was dead, which just goes to show how easily the media can be manipulated and makes you think just how accurate reporting really is.  For me the use of ‘death’ as a motif, is not about morbidity but about change and transition – like the death of the 20^th century gave birth to the 21^st.
I think as an artist too it’s good to kill off parts of your practice that aren’t relevant anymore – much like when they kill off boring characters in tv-sitcoms.  Lots of artists find a groove and stick with it all of their lives and feel they can’t step out of it, because the market won’t understand.  But I think there is a lot of room to express yourself in different genres and avenues like music, performance or illustration that help make up a bigger picture of what you’re about.

Ben Frost, See Inside Box For Details, 2008, acrylic and aerosol on board,  120 x 90 cm

EMC: You are now also working with sculpture; sadly one of your sculptures was broken, with a resulting court case. I recently witnessed a similar event at an opening where an extremely valuable Koori possum skin cloak had red wine spilt on it. I am an advocate for getting up close and personal with artworks, how do you feel about that? Do you have to put barbed wire around your sculptures now at openings?

BF: I can understand vandalism and destruction for a reason, but in the case of my Self-Regenerating Bambi, the girl who knocked it down was just really drunk and had to be carried out of the gallery.  I guess I should probably have less debaucherous openings in retrospect, but it was just a stab in the guts that she could stand there like a drunken zombie and try and tell me to my face that she hadn’t done it.  But my lawyer captured her and we feasted greedily on her corpse.
My girlfriend has had her work stolen from exhibitions on about 4 separate occasions, which I’ve never personally experienced, but yeah it seems like you’ve got to screw the work down these days just to keep it safe and in the gallery.

 

Websites:

www.benfrostisdead.com www.stupidkrap.com www.pastemodernism.com

Telstra National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art Award, review for The Scene, 2007

review for The Scene 2007

The Telstra National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art Award is probably most famous for its controversies, from the provocative t-shirt worn by one of its winners to the allegations that a winning painting was not entirely, erm, Aboriginal.

This year however it wasn’t the art, nor the winner’s t-shirt, that was in the political spotlight (although co-judge Djon Mundine did attempt a bit of t-shirt humour by wearing a slogan that read ‘Aboriginal All the Time’, officially advertising an exhibition he is curating, unofficially perhaps alluding to his questioning of the 2006 Queensland Xstrata Coal Aboriginal Art Award winner’s Aboriginality?).

The award is normally a celebratory event highlighted by Friday night’s ceremonies where the public and the art world gather on the picturesque lawns of the Museum and Art Gallery of the Northern Territory (MAGNT), overlooking the stunning sunset, to listen to live music and applaud the winners. Everyone looks very relieved to be out of the southern winter, and to be appearing, sans winter coat (and hat, gloves and scarf), in the evening.

But this year the award was overshadowed by a dark sense of forboding. There may be tough times ahead for Aboriginal art.

Arts Minister Marion Scrymgour gave an impassioned speech at the inaugural Aboriginal Art Market, a wonderful art fair featuring twenty art centres. She told the crowd of the terrifying steps the Government was taking: removing the permit system, destroying CDEP (government funded Aboriginal workers, many of whom work in art centres) and compulsory acquisition of Aboriginal townships.

Her fury at this was echoed by her stand-in at the announcement of the Award, Deputy Chief Minister Sid Sterling, after Minister Scrymgour had to rush to Canberra to battle the proposed acts. The Chief Minister urged the crowd to ‘take a moment out from art to see politics’, and sadly, that is what may be required.

But back to art for a moment. The NATSIAA is really most famous for being Australia’s oldest and most prestigious Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander art prize.

Founded in 1984 by then MAGNT Indigenous art curator Margie West, the NATSIAA (or The Telstras as it is often known) has become the most important event on the Indigenous art calendar. During a frenetic week in Darwin, artists, dealers, curators, writers and collectors gather to see who won what and to check out the many high-quality art exhibitions that abound in the galleries and rented art spaces around town. It is an exciting time, and the art world literally whips itself into a champagne and mango juice fuelled frenzy. Aside from the often excellent art, which gets everyone’s pulses racing, the week is full of long dinners where the conversation is art, art and more art, and the winning choices are debated with a passion reminiscent of one’s first great love, or perhaps, football team. Be careful what you say and to whom, as the winning artist may have ten dealers representing him or her, and before you know it you may have deeply offended a battle-scarred art dealer as much as if you insulted their children.

There are many bloodshot eyes at the openings over the following days, the result of all-night celebrations with the winners or simply partying at the mostly free events of the Darwin Festival.

This year the big prize of the NATSIAA was awarded to its youngest ever winner, 33-year-old Torres Strait Islander Dennis Nona. Nona is the first Torres Strait Islander winner of the award, and his huge bronze sculpture is indicative of its current nature, where works can be bought by collectors instead of being automatically acquired by the Museum and Art Gallery. This means that the winner gets $40,000 and is also able to sell their work, which has led to larger works being included, such as the Tjanpi Desert Weavers Grass Toyota that won the award two years ago.

Nona, who is well known as a printmaker, required $90,000 to make his 3.5 metre, 650 kilogram sculpture of a mythological crocodile and tattooed man, entitled Ubirikubiri. The work is part of a series of six works, the first of which was acquired by the National Gallery of Australia for $190,000.

There are 104 works in the prize, ranging from painting to new media, displaying the diversity and sophistication inherent within contemporary Aboriginal art.

The exhibitions that feature around the award are also significant, from the stunning master works of Bidyadanga shown at Raft and Northern Editions, to the cross-cultural exhibitions at 24hr Art.

Despite the Government’s attack on Aboriginal culture that will most definitely impact in a negative way on the Aboriginal arts industry (an industry, might I add, which turns over an estimated $200 million each year, and is hugely respected internationally), Aboriginal art is hopefully going to continue in the direction it has previously taken. A direction, as the annual Darwin events display, that has led to it becoming a major player on the world stage of art.

The 24th Telstra National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art Award is on at the Museum and Art Gallery of the Northern Territory until 18 November 2007.

Jim Woodring: Little Minds and Large Agree: The More of You the Less of Me, Fed Square, June 2007

Originally appeared in The Scene, June 1 2007

American cartoonist Jim Woodring’s biography makes several references to his childhood hallucinations, which continued into adulthood. As someone who barely lasted a year of torturous university rote-learning method art history, how could I not relate to someone who, according to Wikipedia, “dropped out of college when he hallucinated a cartoon-like frog in the middle of an art history course”?

I nearly missed his exhibition, entitled Little Minds and Large Agree: The More of You the Less of Me created for Fed Square Fracture Gallery in the Atrium. If one looks the wrong way when entering the large glass structure, one would miss the typical Woodringesque brightly-coloured cartoon of a child’s spinning-top aeroplane flying creature (his famous ‘Frank’ character), holding plus and minus symbol flags, chased after by a puppy-like pyramid shaped creature (who I later discovered is called Pushpaw).

The image is projected onto the glass on the right side of the Atrium, and really needs to be viewed from a distance. The other aspect of the exhibition is a cartoon played on a large video-screen in the back left-hand corner of the Atrium. This cartoon, featuring a kind of surrealist, demented Mad Hatters tea party with what appears to be an imaginative, perhaps drug-affected,  Mickey Mouse, a cute child’s blue and yellow duck and a collaged pig, gives us some clue of the wonder of Woodring’s world.

Unfortunately, the screen had no sound, so I’m unsure as to whether there was dialogue, but the characters did appear to be speaking. I think the work was Visions of Frank, 8 animations (in a variety of animation techniques, from paper craft, iron sand, 2D, 3DCG and clay) made by Japanese filmmakers, with music scored by Japanese and US musicians. There were no apparent signs nearby to inform me what the work was, a bar running under the screen claimed it was the exhibition Jim Woodring: Little Minds and Large Agree: The More of You the Less of Me, but no more information was forthcoming.

Site-specific installation (read: “big translucent sticker”) by Jim Woodring at Federation Square.  www.flickr.com/photos/fordigan

Considering that some of the musicians who have scored the animations include James McNew from Yo La Tengo, it would have been great to be able to hear the soundtrack to this film. The work would perhaps be better suited to a space better equipped to show new media, such as the neighbouring ACMI, where one could hear as well as see the fun of Woodring’s world. As an introduction into his work, this exhibition at least serves some kind of purpose. While not quite in the established gallery, the NGV, it is least right outside it, and it is gratifying to see an underground comic artist appreciated in this way.I was left with wanting more though, it would be great to see an entire exhibition of this artist’s work, as Woodring is one of the more prolific and admired comic artists around. He has published several books of his comics, made toys and animations, and you can even buy his fingerprints to put in your home. I hope we see more of this artist in Melbourne in the future.

More JW & Pupshaw on Tumblr

Billy Benn Perrurle: for Australian Art Collector 2006

Billy Benn Perrurle, Artetyerr, 2006, synthetic polymer paint on plywood, 48.4 x 243.5cm board. Collection AGNSW.

Winner of the 34^th Alice Prize 2006, the Anmatyerre artist Billy Benn was taught painting by his older sisters, Utopia artists Ally and Gladdy Kemarre, known for their colourful paintings often depicting flowers and women’s ceremonies.

Born around 1943 on his father’s country of Artetyerre (Harts Range) in Central Australia, his work has risen to prominence through his beautifully rendered small landscape paintings.

The gentleness of his paintings give little hint of the difficult life of the artist, who began work in mica mines at age 10, and whose experiences include accusations of murder of a man in 1967 – for which he was later acquitted on the grounds of insanity. He spent years working as a sheet metal worker, painting on wooden boards, often discarded by the Alice Springs Timber Mill.

His effective depiction of landscape, described by Cath Bowdler as ‘wonderful and intimate renditions of a remembered and loved country. Fresh, moving and raw’, is the result of his meditative focus on his land, his knowledge of its dreamings, which include antenhe (possum) and corroborees, combined with an artistic talent inherited from his father, who was a skilled carver.

In their depiction of the unique and stunningly beautiful mountain ranges and eucalypts of Central Australia, Benn’s landscapes recall the paintings of master landscape painter Albert Namatjira, yet are also very much his own. Especially notable is his ability to encapsulate a great depth of field on small surface (most of Benn’s canvases average between 20-30 centimetres). A founding member of Mwerre Anthurre Artists (Bindi Inc.), an Alice Springs arts centre established to provide employment and artistic expression for disabled Aboriginal people, Benn’s work first came to attention in 2000 in exhibitions in Alice Springs, in particular the annual Desert Mob exhibition at Araluen. His work has also been exhibited in Darwin at Karen Brown Gallery; in Melbourne at Gallery Gabrielle Pizzi, Alcaston Gallery and Alison Kelly Gallery; and Alice Springs, at Gallery Gondwana. Leading public exhibitions in which his work has been seen include 2004: Australian Culture Now, National Gallery of Victoria Australia, 2004; and From Little Things Big Things Grow, NGA, 2004.

The Last of the Nomads: Warlimpirrnga Tjapaltjarri, Walala Tjapaltjarri and Thomas Tjapaltjarri

Antiques & Art In Victoria

April-August, 2003

From the ancient rites and song cycles of the Pintupi, the remote Western Desert language group, (several of whom were still living in the Gibson and Great Sandy Deserts right up until the later 20^th century), come the contemporary paintings of Warlimpirrnga Tjapaltjarri, Walala Tjapaltjarri and Thomas Tjapaltjarri.

These three brothers made international headlines in 1984 when they arrived out of the desert at Kiwirrkura, a Pintupi settlement near the boarder of Western Australia and the Northern Territory. They can now be counted alongside Australia’s most interesting artists, having been involved in many exhibitions in Australia and overseas.

Their wonderful, seemingly abstract designs, derived from body painting, ground painting and the decoration of traditional artefacts, are being increasingly well received in Australia.

They first made contact with Europeans when they appeared under Kiwirrkura’s water tower in October 1984. A group of nine, it included three women who are now artists, Yakultji Napaltjarri, Yalti Napangardi and Takarria Napaltjarri. Two of the ‘nomads’,Warlimpirrnga Tjapaltjarri and his other brother Pierti Tjapaltjarri (who went back into the desert and became a myth until re-appearing at Ti Tree), had previously approached two the men from Kiwirrkura, the famous artist Pinta Pinta Tjapanangka and his son, at hills north of the settlement: a place called Winparrku.

Tjapanangka and his son, fearing the nomads were ‘Kadaitcha men’, or retribution killers, panicked, scaring off the desert nomads. But these people were relatives of theirs, not seen since the 1950s when most Pintupi had come in to the government reserves. As part of traditional Pintupi law, the nomads had come to make contact with their relatives to perform ‘sorry business’, a mourning process, for a relative who had died. The Pintupi from Kiwirrkura tracked them down and eventually they ‘came in’ from the desert, for good.

Several years later Warlimpirrnga, the eldest of the men, took up a paintbrush after observing artists painting at Kiwirrkura. His first eleven works, exhibited in Melbourne, were bought and donated to the National Gallery of Victoria now NGV Ian Potter Centre for Contemporary Art at Federation Square, a gallery which places Aboriginal art on a worldwide stage. This will no doubt increase local interest in an art movement that has long been held in high-regard by those overseas, particularly Europeans and Americans, who have collected and mounted exhibitions of these works with a vigour that we in Australia should attempt to attain.

Perhaps these Western Desert works, which can be seen as being both representations of an important ancient culture and a fascinating contemporary, seemingly abstract art, are more readily accepted by an audience familiar with Abstract Expressionism and Abstract Minimalist art. In Australia we have never really had a very strong Abstract Expressionist art movement as has the United States, tending to rely on figurative, landscape or narrative works, In fact, it has been argued very convincingly that our greatest Abstract Expressionist artists are Aboriginal artists. They are also Australia’s greatest landscape artists; being the only indigenous people, they have the authority and knowledge to paint the land in a way in which no-one else can. Their ochre paintings are not only depictions of land, they are the land, having been created from the earth itself.

One look at these three artists certainly confirms this view. Their works mostly consist of line work and geometric forms, with the more recognisable ‘dots’ so familiar to us as the major feature of Aboriginal Desert art often used to highlight the lines, as in the early Papunya Tula boards, rather than to fill in the canvas.

The eldest of the skilled draughtsmen in paint is Warlimpirrnga Tjapaltjarri. He was born east of Kiwirrkura in the late 1950s. His paintings depict Tingari stories for his country which is around the sites of Marua and Kanapilya. The Tingari Cycle is a series of secret-sacred mythological songs that are associated with many places throughout Pintupi land, which covers the Gibson and Great Sandy Deserts.

One of his works in Nangara, the Ebes Collection, is a classic example of the Tingari Cycle as represented in Pintupi art. Entitled ‘Tingari at Wala Wala’, this 1995 painting Wilkinkarra (Lake Mackay). In mythological times, a group of Tingari men and women travelled to this site to perform ceremonies. Warlimpirrnga has painted roundels, representing rock holes in the country through which they passed, and straight and sinuous lines, which are body paint designs. He creates other paintings derived straight from ancient Pintupi mythology, such as a ‘Bushfire at Wilkinkarra’ and a ‘Dingo Dreaming at Marawa’.

Walala Tjapaltjarri’s work, like all Pintupi painting, represents the travels, camps and activities of the Tingari people in mythological times. Born in about 1960, he was instructed by Warlimpirrnga in the use of acrylic paints, and paints his inherited Dreaming sites. These include eleven sites, located throughout his country near Wilkinkarra. They are Marua, Minatarnpi, Tarrku, Njami and Yarrawangu as well as Mina Mina, an important women’s site made famous by Warlpiri artist Dorothy Napangardi Robinson.

Walala’s works often relate to the ancestral Tingari men’s initiation rites (called malliera) held in the Gibson Desert. Like other great masters of contemporary Aboriginal art, such as Emily Kame Kngwarreye and Rover Thomas, Walala often used a bi-chromatic colour scheme that is simultaneously incredibly contemporary and also ancient.

His younger brother Thomas Tjapaltjarri, born at Murruwa, east of Kiwirrkura, sometime in the 1970s, started painting once he reached the correct age. Like many Aboriginal artists, he depicts his birthplace in his paintings. Marruwa has ‘tali tjuta’ many sand hills and also contains imagery, like Walala’s works, associated with malliera. This he inherits from his Tjungurrayi father and his Tjapaltjarri grandfather. I find his work to be as compelling as his brothers’, if not even more so, not just for the exquisite beauty of some of his paintings, but also for the variety of styles he is capable of painting in.

Pintupi art is undisputedly one of the most important art movements to have happened in Australia over the past 30 years. The desert art movement which began at Papunya in 1971 was largely comprised of Pintupi men, now all deceased. Their great spirits and knowledge of the land are remembered only in the few public galleries and museums where this work can be viewed, or seen once a year when they appear for tens or even hundred of thousands of dollars in the Aboriginal art auctions. Their remaining wives, sisters and daughters are continuing their mission, to preserve in paint the laws and mythology of the Pintupi those ‘great free men of the Gibson Desert’, as Geoffrey Bardon called them. Very few of their sons and grandsons are painters, not willing or able to keep up the traditions.

The three Tjapaltjarris paint designs which have been passed down for thousands of years unchanged; evidence of an important and unique civilisation that has survived at the end of the 20^th century in one of the harshest terrains known to humankind.

Emily Kame Kngwarreye and Minnie Pwerle

Originally appeared in Antiques & Art in Victoria December 2002- April 2003

In the last year or so, a new name has come to the attention of aficionados of Aboriginal art – Minnie Pwerle. An Anmatyerre/Alyawarre artist hailing from the now famous Central Desert area of Utopia, this artist has become something of a ‘known secret in the Aboriginal art world.’[i] With her rising popularity, collectability, her age (around 80 years) and her work itself, which is based on women’s body paint designs, come the inevitable comparisons to that other great dame of the bush, the late Emily Kame Kngwarreye who was an Eastern Anmatyerre woman.

These two artists share certain similarities. Yet one could argue that they are also distinct artists in their own right, and that much of these similarities are more a result of their shared culture and family relationship than anything else. What is certain, however, is that Minnie is as close to ‘another Emily’ as we are ever going to get,[ii] now that Kngwarreye has passed away.

The similarities between these two artists are important. Firstly, they are relatives. Kngwarreye was Minnie’s cousin through marriage (in the Aboriginal classificatory sense, her sister), and they shared many aspects of ceremonial life at Utopia. Present in both their works is the dominance of ‘bush tucker’ as subject matter, whether it is the bush melon of Minnie’s work or the different kinds of yams in Emily’s. These plants find their expression in the special body paint designs which women paint on the breasts and upper arms for Awelye, or women’s ceremonies. They are totemic design related to the creation of each woman’s ‘country’, or inherited area of land: land that has been passed down through generations of Anmatyerre/Alyawarre people for thousands of years.

These artists are remembering the spirits of the ancestors who created this land, the songlines they travelled as they created, and the sacred places where they rested or gathered. Each artist’s country is of the utmost importance to her. It is her spiritual and social identity. It is the essence of who she is.

The major difference between Emily and Minnie is that they did not share the same country. Emily was ‘boss woman’ for Alhalkere, her country that was celebrated in her retrospective exhibition, so much so that the curator gave it as the exhibition’s title. Yet, Alhalkere is not the only area at Utopia that has been celebrated in paint. One must remember that there are five land-holding clans on Utopia.
Minnie’s country is Atnwengerrp, where the once abundant bush melon (a sweet fruit) grows. Minnie only paints three subjects. Her Awelye-Atnwengerrp is a series of bold lines painted against a black or coloured background. These are the works which are most similar to Emily’s, particularly her body paint works such as the Utopia panels; they also recall artists such as Tony Tuckson. Bush Melon works involve circles depicting the fruit and breast paint designs belonging to the Pwerle skin group, and lastly Bush Melon Seed, which incorporates smaller roundels of colour.
Emily, on the other hand, had about nine dreamings, as expressed in her famous ‘whole lot’ statement,[iii] although they are all simply aspects as Christopher Hodges has noted, of her country.[iv] In an Aboriginal art market with its demand for explanatory ‘stories’ for non-Indigenous people to ‘understand’ the art, she never ‘gave story’ (see Judith Ryan’s essay in the Alhalkere catalogue). She is, in this regard, a thorough post-modernist, refusing to give ‘explanations’ for her work: rather she always claimed that they were simply about ‘her country’. In this regard Emily is now seen as one of our finest landscape painters.

Emily Kame Kngwarreye (Kam Kngwarray), Big Yam Dreaming, 1995, synthetic polymer paint on canvas, 291.1 x 801.8 cm, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne © Emily Kame Kngwarreye.

Minnie Pwerle, Awelye – Women’s Ceremony, 2004, acrylic on canvas,  152.5 x 125 cm.

Minnie is similar. To her, her paintings are Awelye, ceremonial designs that cover every aspect of the connection to her land. She, too, has an independent spirit and has never made a coolamon or a clapstick, has never painted typical ‘Aboriginal style’ paintings with U-shapes representing women or the more recognisable Aboriginal iconography. She, like Emily, has stuck to her own expression, no matter what those around her may think of it.

Minnie’s paintings can almost be seen as a continuation of Emily’s work, in terms of her brilliance as an artist. They have taken abstract art to a new level. We are not only seeing the land of the painter expressed through a symbolic, totemic design – a process by which we could be seen to be undergoing a shifting of perspective – a different way of seeing art,[v] – we are viewing the work of a great modern artist who is breaking ground in Australian painting.In much the same way that it has been noted that Emily ‘had solved all the problems of Impressionism and captured the essence of pure sensation in a way that Monet, on his own admission, had struggled to achieve throughout his career’[vi] Minnie is continuing (without being aware of it in a theoretical sense) the work of such Australian abstractionists as Tony Tuckson and Ian Fairweather. Their work was, of course, influenced by Aboriginal art.

And just as Emily has been compared to the New York school of Abstract Expressionists, such as Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko, whose work was influenced by Navajo sand paintings, Minnie’s art will no doubt be compared to these Australian abstract painters. Compare, for example, Tony Tuckson’s work White Lines (horizontal on red) reproduced in the Alhalkere catalogue, and now hanging in the Indigenous art gallery at the National Gallery of Victoria, to one of Minnie Pwerle’s reductionist line work paintings.

Tony Tuckson, White Lines (Horizontal) on Red, 1970-73, synthetic polymer paint on composition board, 182.8 x 137.4 cm, Collection National Gallery of Victoria.

 

Minnie Pwerle, Awelye Atnwengerrp, 2002, acrylic on linen, 120 x 90 cm. DACOU Aboriginal Art Melbourne/Flinders Lane Gallery. Private Collection.

Although Emily had never seen the work of the Abstract Expressionists, and Minnie had never seen the work of Tony Tuckson, it should be noted how much of the greatest contemporary art is working in a cyclical way, from Indigenous to non-Indigenous artists, back and round again. This is the greatest expression of reconciliation. It can only be a result of the collective unconscious. These designs are universal and non-Indigenous people have lost them. It is only our artists who can tap into the primordial in order to regain them.

The paintings of Minnie Pwerle ‘have a quality all of their own.’[vii] One thing that differentiates her immediately from Emily is that she has never painted a dot in her life, while Emily was famous for her large dotted canvases. In fact, half of the paintings in Emily’s retrospective involved dots, whether they are in the foreground or background. Minnie’s works are comprised purely of line and colour. Her palette, too, differs from Emily’s.  Most of Emily’s works were comprised of soft yellows, pinks and oranges, with others with green, maroon and violets. Minnie’s is in some ways a stronger palette of reds, ultramarine and indigo blues, bright oranges, bright yellow, and lots of white on black. She is less inclined to blend the paint than Emily was, less inclined to diffuse it with light and more inclined to work with a starker, bolder palette.

Yet the similarity between these artists lies in the sense of energy in their paintings – a bold, powerful force which ‘gives these canvases a noticeable spontaneity and vibrancy.[viiii]  Also their highly sophisticated level of abstraction, their love of land and their ‘lack of concern for precision,’ as Margo Neale has noted,[ix] is comparable. Noting Emily’s painting methods, Neale state that she ‘would almost attack the canvas – robustly, assertively. Her dots and lines weave in and under, stop and start, and appear to follow no rules. They are radical and aberrant works and the more I see of them the more I feel both emotionally and physically affected.’[x]

The same could be said for Minnie. Her works have a physical, emotional, and even spiritual impact on the viewer that takes your breath away. Unlike much of Emily’s work, which was imbued with a kind of quiet, impressionistic sense of calm, Minnie’s work seems to be coming straight out  of the women’s ceremonies, with little regard for white convention. One can almost see the women dancing in a line, celebrating the secret-sacred aspects of life, the special ‘women’s business’, the fertility rites, the rites of passage from mother to daughter to granddaughter, which have been carried out for so long. The celebration of the spirit that lives in the land, the people, the animals, and most importantly, the plants, which bring survival in the form of food and medicine when times are tough is evident.

All of these aspects exist in Minnie’s work, and yet it seems so fresh, so modern, that one can only be amazed at the talent of this octogenarian painter.

 

[i] Susan McCulloch-Uehlin, ‘Minnie Pwerle: Bush Melon Stories’, Australian Art Collector, Issue 22, October-December 2002.
[ii] Although I believe this is true, I wish to point out that Kngwarreye was a highly individual artist, who was as famous for the uniqueness of her art in a world too often dominated by ‘sameness’, as she was for her art’s modern abstract qualities, or for her elderliness.
[iii] Emily’s most definitive statement about her subject matter has been over-quoted, in the absence of other definitions: ‘Whole lot, that’s a whole lot. Awelye, Arltyeye (pencil yam), Ankerrthe (mountain devil lizard), Ntange (grass seed), Tingu (a Dreamtime pup), Ankerre (emu), Intekwe (a favourite food of emus, a small plant) Atnwerle (green bean) and Kame (yam seed). That’s what I paint: whole lot…’ (from the Alhalkere catalogue, ed. by Margo Neale, Queensland Art Gallery, 1998.

[iv] ‘Alhalkere was her only subject…by articulating this list, Kngwarreye gives names to component parts. She does not allude to the complex inter-relationships between the elements. ‘Whole lot’ means what it says, her paintings are about the whole, the body of knowledge rather than its unique parts.’ Christopher Hodges, Alhalkere, p.33.

[v] Australian literary critics have talked about the ‘Aboriginalisation’ of contemporary Australian society, wherein the younger non-indigenous generations are learning about Aboriginal culture, while their parents and grandparents never did, imbuing them with a respect for and appreciation of this culture and the land on which they now live (see David Tacey’s book, The Edge of the Sacred). This produces a new way of seeing, in much the same way that the study of Aboriginal art can bring about a new way of seeing art in general.
[vi] Eric Whitley, quote in Margo Neale, Alhalkere, p.29.

[vii] Susan McCulloch-Uehlin, Australian Art Collector, issue 22.

[viii] Ibid.

[ix] Margo Neale, quoted in S. McCulloch, The Australian Magazine, 14 February 1998.

[x] Ibid.

Three Generations of Utopia: Minnie Pwerle, Barbara Weir and Teresa Pwerle

Antiques & Art, 2002
Since the achievements in painting made by the famous late Utopian artist Emily Kame Kngwarreye during the 1990s, Central Desert art has continued to feature prominently on the Australian art scene. Whether it is in exhibitions, in galleries, in collections or auctions, art from Utopia has become an important and permanent part of contemporary Aboriginal art. Unlike its counterpart, Western Desert art, Utopian art has, since its inception, featured women artists predominantly. Although there are several historical reasons for this (women art co-ordinators, the Women’s Centre at Utopia being the focus for the production of the art etc.), it is the women of Utopia themselves who have made this art movement into what it is today. Artists such as Kngwarreye were noted not just for their incredible painting ability, but also for their powerful personalities; personalities which were as present in the boldness of their brushstrokes and the vibrancy of their colours as they were when one was in conversation with them.

For those who aren’t yet aware of this great Australian artist, take note: Emily Kame Kngwarreye was an art phenomenon; a tribal Aboriginal woman in her eighties who painted works which were consistently compared to (with great reason) many of the greats of modern art: Rothko, de Kooning, Pollock and even Monet were some comparisons. She shook modern Australian art to its very foundations, and, as has often been noted, she put Utopia on the map. Since her death, other Utopian artists have continued to surprise us with their work: artists such as Gloria Petyarre, Ada Bird Petyarre, Kathleen Petyarre, Gloria Ngale, Anna Petyarre, Abie Loy, Angelina Pwerle, Lily Sandover Kngwarreye and Nancy Petyarre have become increasingly well-respected and collectible artists. Their works are regularly seen in exhibition. They are given favourable reviews, are featured in the media and included in lists of Australia’s most collectable artists.

Two of the most prolific and interesting artists to have come out of Utopia are Barbara Weir and her mother, Minnie Pwerle. The daughter of Minnie (an Anmatyerre/Alyawarre woman) and a white man, Barbara Weir was taken from Utopia Station as a child by the Native Welfare Patrol. She spent many years living in various parts of Australia, and did not rediscover her family and country until many years later, in the late 1960s. She spent time living at Papunya, where she worked with many of the men who nowadays are considered to be the founders of the desert art painting movement. On her return to Utopia, she spent years re-familiarising herself with Minnie and her Aunt Emily, caring for her while she painted.

Weir began painting in the early 1990s, and her paintings are derived from her mother’s and maternal grandfather’s country. Weir’s grandfather was an important figure in her early life. She says that he taught her a dreaming song, which she remembered the whole time that she was separated from her family and her land. The visual narrative of this song is depicted in many of her paintings, particularly in her series My Mother’s Country. In these works the songlines of the ancestors, their camps, waterholes, secret and sacred places are all depicted, as well as the spirits of the land, the water that runs through Utopia and the bush foods, animals, plants, grasses, flowers and berries which grew so abundantly before the white man came.

Whilst Weir has been painting for some time, her mother Minnie Pwerle only came to painting more recently. When she first put brush to canvas in 1999, her family and their colleagues were amazed. Utopia, it seemed, had done it again. This independent Aboriginal community has once more produced an artist, totally ‘untaught’ (in Western terms) who could paint incredible work. Here was an older woman who could not only paint, but who was, for lack of a better term, a genius.

Although Pwerle is Kngwarreye’s tribal sister, and there is some similarity in their depiction of Awelye (women’s ceremonial body paint designs), her work is different. She has lived as a tribal woman for her entire life, and grew up collecting bush tucker, and, although she is in her eighties, can still hunt a mean lizard. She must have experienced some changing and challenging times – the introduction of western culture into her own, the invasion of rabbits and other pests onto her land, the loss of her child. Yet in spite of all this, she remains a strong, yet shy, woman whose strength of personality belies her diminutive size.

Her personality is evident in her paintings. As the beauty of Weir’s art is often the result of careful, meticulous layering of fine dots and symbols (such as in the My Mother’s Country series) or in the shimmering, impressionist quality of her Grass Seed Dreaming series, Pwerle’s work is most notable for its bold vivacious expressionism. Confident brushstrokes, beautiful, bright colours and creative patterning with gestural line are all distinctive aspects of this octogenerian painter.

And now a third generation has risen amongst this family of artists. Weir’s eldest daughter, Teresa Pwerle, who has lived in Utopia, Alice Springs, Broome and Adelaide, is also a painter. In her new series of works, we see the beginnings of a new chapter in Aboriginal art. Like the new generation of women from Lockhart River in Queensland, Pwerle is able to bring designs from traditional Aboriginal law and ceremony and place them into a contemporary context. Her paintings, like her mother’s work, are finely executed and range from the subtle to the strong. She has been given permission to paint the songlines of her grandparent’s country from the elder women of Utopia. Two tracks appear along either side of the canvas, with intricate dots in the centre, dense with secret symbols hidden underneath. The tracks represent the women singing and dancing through the native grass at ceremony time, a practice that has been done since time immemorial. As a contemporary Anmatyerre/Alyawarre woman, Teresa brings her traditional culture into the modern world in a similar way to Barbara, by experimenting with the broad palette that acrylic paint can offer. She is as fearless of colour (and as skilled in its use) as her forebears are.

The element which binds these three women is not just their family connection, but also their land. All three share the same land, which means that they have responsibility for it and also dreaming designs associated with it. Minnie, Barbara and Teresa share similarities in their art, yet the three are also totally independent artists with distinctive styles.

Minnie’s paintings are those of a tribal elder and their designs, with no dot-work, come directly from the body paint designs associated with the women’s ceremony and bush melon dreaming. Barbara’s diverse styles are a combination of symbols and fine dotting, or they are mediative, like her Grass Seeds, or experimental, like her works in ochre and oils such as The Creation of My Mother’s Dreamtime. Teresa has another style again, completely her own.

As Minnie is a great-great-grandmother, soon there will be more generations of Utopian artists coming up. Who knows, we may have four or five generations of artists before too long, which would be great news for art, and even greater news for art lovers.