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Shorty Lungkarta Tjungurrayi’s “Mystery Sand Mosaic”, 1974 (Photo: Grey Gallery)
Ken Johnson of the New York Times recently wrote a review of the show, “Icons of the Desert: Early Aboriginal Paintings From Papunya” currently on view at the Grey Art Gallery at New York University. I haven’t seen the show yet but will be down to visit in a few weeks.
Western-centric critics frequently struggle with how to review and respond to Aboriginal art, and I find that disconnect understandable. A prickly cultural confusion persists about how to “appropriately” approach non-Western art and artifacts, a discussion I have addressed in this blog on many occasions. The discomfort and reticence that is so prevalent in many responses to Aboriginal art is sometimes accompanied with a much needed caveat that this is not just a trivial cultural divide. Johnson includes his own acknowledgment of the gap that exists between our two worlds: “The Aboriginal cast of mind is so different from that of the West that even the most extensive explanations can be mystifying. ‘The Dreaming,’ a recurring subject in Aboriginal paintings that has to do with the origins of the world, is a pretty hard concept to grasp for a viewer raised on French Enlightenment-style reasoning.”
A tip of the hat to Grey Gallery for their culturally sensitive accommodation of Aboriginal tradition regarding sacred material:
At the doorway leading to the Grey’s downstairs gallery, a wall label warns away Aboriginal women and children should any happen to be visiting. Two of the paintings below are the only ones in the show depicting people, but none in the lower-level group are any more compelling than the ones upstairs. They are restricted because they represent information that only male initiates are traditionally allowed to know. They are also believed to be inhabited by dangerously powerful supernatural entities. Secularized Westerners don’t think art can have that kind of potency, but who knows, maybe that is our loss.
I can’t speak for you, but potency is what I’m looking for every day.
Rock and fungi, Tasmania, 2007
Two of the comments to my earlier post, Threading through Abstraction, Micro and Macro, came in from Down Under. Both of these writers offered a thoughtful expansion of the discussion I began in my post. My experience is that this issue of nature and abstraction has particular significance in the aesthetic milieu that is Australian contemporary art. Both of these comments bring that unique sensibility to bear.
Here are a few excerpts that are worth sharing:
About 15 yrs ago I heard it said – in relation to the meeting of the original inhabitants of Australia with the white settlers from Britain in 1788 – that this was a low tech, high psyche people meeting a high tech, low psyche people – and whilst that may come across as a clumsy or even deeply problematic statement… it certainly provoked me to ruminate on the notion of “high psyche” and divert my attention to conceptual underpinnings of the Art of Indigenous Australia – be it from Rock engravings suggested to be many thousands of years old, to bark paintings dating back hundreds of years or recent works on canvas.
I’m deeply embarrassed to think of what was taught in school during my school years in the 60’s/70’s regarding the very people whose Art has given me so much.
–Sophie Munn
The subject fascinates me and in here in Australia the dialogue, I feel, is a bit one sided. That is the indigenous contribution so outweighs the non-indigenous one that I get frustrated. We painters committed to “abstract” picture making take risks that perhaps (and the representational painters might take offense to this) separate us by the nature of the risks we take. “Just try”, I ask the landscape painters in my head when I see their paintings, “to walk into the studio without your subject matter staring you in the face.”
The indigenous artists need not do this of course because it isn’t staring them right in the face, it’s inside of them, the same way our imagery dwells within us. Have a look at some of the paintings recently on display at Utopia Fine art in Sydney this month. It never ceases to amaze me how “contemporary” the work looks.
Our language is universal—modernist or not.
–Gordon Waters
BTW, both Sophie and Gordon are gifted artists. You can see more of their work here:
Aboriginal rock painting, Kakadu, Aust. Credit: Thomas Schoch
As a follow on to my earlier post on human spaciality, Stanford assistant professor of psychology, neuroscience, and symbolic systems Lera Boroditsky has written a piece on Edge that explores how individual languages shape the way speakers think about space, time, colors and objects. She demonstrates that language has a fundamental impact on thought, “unconsciously shaping us from the nuts and bolts of cognition and perception to our loftiest abstract notions and major life decisions. Language is central to our experience of being human, and the languages we speak profoundly shape the way we think, the way we see the world, the way we live our lives.”
One of her examples was particularly provocative to me given my interest in aboriginal art and what it represents to its makers. (To read my postings on aboriginal art and culture, do a search here for “aboriginal art”.)
Boroditsky’s example:
Follow me to Pormpuraaw, a small Aboriginal community on the western edge of Cape York, in northern Australia. I came here because of the way the locals, the Kuuk Thaayorre, talk about space. Instead of words like “right,” “left,” “forward,” and “back,” which, as commonly used in English, define space relative to an observer, the Kuuk Thaayorre, like many other Aboriginal groups, use cardinal-direction terms — north, south, east, and west — to define space.1 This is done at all scales, which means you have to say things like “There’s an ant on your southeast leg” or “Move the cup to the north northwest a little bit.” One obvious consequence of speaking such a language is that you have to stay oriented at all times, or else you cannot speak properly. The normal greeting in Kuuk Thaayorre is “Where are you going?” and the answer should be something like ” Southsoutheast, in the middle distance.” If you don’t know which way you’re facing, you can’t even get past “Hello.”
The result is a profound difference in navigational ability and spatial knowledge between speakers of languages that rely primarily on absolute reference frames (like Kuuk Thaayorre) and languages that rely on relative reference frames (like English).2 Simply put, speakers of languages like Kuuk Thaayorre are much better than English speakers at staying oriented and keeping track of where they are, even in unfamiliar landscapes or inside unfamiliar buildings. What enables them — in fact, forces them — to do this is their language. Having their attention trained in this way equips them to perform navigational feats once thought beyond human capabilities. Because space is such a fundamental domain of thought, differences in how people think about space don’t end there. People rely on their spatial knowledge to build other, more complex, more abstract representations. Representations of such things as time, number, musical pitch, kinship relations, morality, and emotions have been shown to depend on how we think about space. So if the Kuuk Thaayorre think differently about space, do they also think differently about other things, like time? This is what my collaborator Alice Gaby and I came to Pormpuraaw to find out.
To test this idea, we gave people sets of pictures that showed some kind of temporal progression (e.g., pictures of a man aging, or a crocodile growing, or a banana being eaten). Their job was to arrange the shuffled photos on the ground to show the correct temporal order. We tested each person in two separate sittings, each time facing in a different cardinal direction. If you ask English speakers to do this, they’ll arrange the cards so that time proceeds from left to right. Hebrew speakers will tend to lay out the cards from right to left, showing that writing direction in a language plays a role.3 So what about folks like the Kuuk Thaayorre, who don’t use words like “left” and “right”? What will they do?
The Kuuk Thaayorre did not arrange the cards more often from left to right than from right to left, nor more toward or away from the body. But their arrangements were not random: there was a pattern, just a different one from that of English speakers. Instead of arranging time from left to right, they arranged it from east to west. That is, when they were seated facing south, the cards went left to right. When they faced north, the cards went from right to left. When they faced east, the cards came toward the body and so on. This was true even though we never told any of our subjects which direction they faced. The Kuuk Thaayorre not only knew that already (usually much better than I did), but they also spontaneously used this spatial orientation to construct their representations of time.
Thank you to Steve Durbin at Art & Perception for sending me the link to this article.
I found a wonderful blog about all things Aboriginal–Will Owen’s Aboriginal Art & Culture: an American eye. He’s been at it for some time, so there is a lot of material to review and well worth the time.
In a recent posting Owen reviews a new book by Jennifer Biddle, Breasts, Bodies, Canvas: Central Desert art as experience. From his review:
Although Biddle’s investigations rely on close examination of the works…she does not offer readings of them, or attempt to decode the symbols used in them. Her extensive analysis of paintings by Emily Kame Kngwarreye, Kathleen Petyarre, and Dorothy Napangardi likewise tells us nothing of the Dreamings of the yam, the thorny devil lizard , or Mina Mina. Instead, Biddle tells the reader early on that such translation of iconography is quite antithetical to her purpose, and suggests that the women themselves are now reacting to the practice of translation by refusing to give titles to their artworks or to provide more than the most rudimentary stories. She suggests that our eurocentric emphasis on reading–the interpretation of men’s paintings as maps with specific, knowable geographical locations embedded in them, for example–has blinded us to the true nature of these paintings. That nature is best located in the physical being, in the marks of their making that are a mimesis of the ancestral actions of the Dreaming.
Biddle wants us to turn our attention away from an intellectual analysis of the art towards an appreciation of its affect, by which she means a more visceral and pre-analytical response to the work. Such a reaction is one that is grounded in sensation, in the perception of the thickness of paint, in the visible but also palpable traces of the artist’s body in the object. This perception takes us not only to an appreciation of the artwork’s origin in body painting and scarring, but also to an appreciation of the physical connection between the artist’s brush and the canvas, or the touch of the painting stick on a women’s breast as kirda (owner) and kurdungurlu (manager, and in this sense painter) prepare for the ceremony.
Owen then goes on to say:
If we are capable of penetrating to this level of understanding through direct, sensual engagement with the artwork, then we are better positioned, even as outsiders, to appreciate the it from an indigenous perspective, to understand the power embodied in it.
There are so many ways to approach this work. Earlier on this blog I have posted a variety of viewpoints–from anthropologists, art historians, ethnographers and artists. I’m enough of a pluralist to be curious about all these points of view, but I buckle against any programmatic and proscribed determination about what the non-Aboriginal viewer can and can’t see, what we can and cannot understand. Excluding the “made for tourist” art that you see in Australia which has no intentionality beyond serving as a travel souvenir, these works have an intrinsic power. Access where and how you will.
One more excerpt from Fred Myers’ Painting Culture:
Myers highlights the distinctions between the paintings of the Pintupi tribe and the art from Balgo, just south of the Pintupi land:
Pintupi culture
valorizes some dimensions of painting–a painting’s truth in relation to the Dreaming, the right of expression as part of one’s identity–but gives no particular discursive support to…the aesthetic function.
In Balgo Hills
a different dimension of ritual painting practice has become critical; the element of touch as transferring spiritual essence…a continued emphasis on the haptic, or tactile, quality of painting, with the deployment of paint on the canvas more closely replicating the painting of bodies, focusing on the penetration of colors into the surface.
Both of these impulses–the mystical, unspoken connection with something larger than life as well as the body-based ritual and sacred gesture–speak powerfully to me.
More on the topic of Aboriginal art through the eyes of Fred Myers:
In Painting Culture, Myer quotes Nancy Munn who describes the Aboriginal relationship to their country as
an objectification of ancestral subjectivity. Places where significant events took place, where power was left behind, or where the ancestors went into the ground and still remain–places where ancestral potency is near–are sacred sites.
Myers goes on to say:
The country is not the only objectification of such processes. Other parts of Pintupi life are likewise thought to derive from the Dreaming. Pintupi understand that the Dreamings left behind at various places the creative potency or spiritual essence of all the natural species and of human beings. Thus an individual is said to “have become visible” (yurtirringu)–in reference either to “conception” [quickening in the womb] or to actual birth. The place from which one’s spirit comes determines one’s Dreaming; he or she is an incarnation of the ancestor who made the place. This understanding of personhood makes place a primary component of an individual’s identity…people are determined to have come from a particular country, literally to share its essence, for this “consubstantiality” is the primary basis for owning a sacred site. It is one’s property in an inalienable sense.
Makes complete sense to me.
One of the leading anthropological experts on Aboriginal art and culture is Fred R. Myers. His 2002 book, Painting Culture: The Making of an Aboriginal High Art, explores the Western Desert Aboriginal painting movement through a lens that is more culture based than visual or aesthetic. Myers, a Professor of Anthropology at NYU, spent time in Australia during the 1970s as the painting movement was beginning to gain momentum. His insights add another witness to the mystery and power of these paintings.
Here are a few excerpts from the book:
The painters insist that these representations or images are “not made up,” “not made by men,” but “come from the Dreaming”. In this sense, they are described in the same fashion as are persons, customs, and geographic features—all of which are said to have originated in the Dreaming, or as Pintupi people regularly say, “Rjukurrtjanu, mularrarringu” [from the Dreaming, it became real.] They are therefore more valuable than anything humans might invent.
And this, his description of the Dreaming:
It would be inadequate to conceive of the Dreaming simply as a philosophy, as an explanation of what there is, or as an explanation of “the landscape.” The Dreaming is not the landscape itself or principally even an explanation of it, although that is one of its qualities. The landscape instead is how the Dreaming has been materialized, how it has been experienced, a manifestation of it, but it is not an account of what it “is”.
This description–more what it is not than what it is–is reminiscent of some of Western mystical/metaphysical traditions as well as writings about the Tao and Zen Buddhism. It does suggest a liminal zone–one of those in between places that I always find welcoming.
Howard Morphy is a leading authority on Aboriginal art and the director of the Centre for Cross-Cultural Research at The Australian National University. In his article, Seeing Aboriginal Art in the Gallery, he explores a number of issues that I have been writing and thinking about. Here is one idea excerpt:
The theory of a universal aesthetic is intertwined with a theory of viewing that opposes the art gallery to the museum. In this theory works of art should be allowed to speak for themselves. Thus they need their own space for contemplation, and though their meaning and impact will be affected by their relationship to adjacent works, and to the hang as a whole, it is desirable that the act of viewing should take place in space as uncluttered as possible by supplementary information. While the density of hangs varies, as does the amount of information provided, these broad principles apply in art galleries around the world. Museums, on the other hand, are often defined in opposition to art galleries as places where objects are contextualised by information, by accompanying interpretative materials, by dioramas, and by being seen in association with other objects. I think that it is desirable to distinguish the Western concept of ’seeing things’ as art from the presumption of a universalistic aesthetic and indeed to separate ’seeing things’ as isolated or decontextualised objects from ’seeing things’ as art.
Aboriginal art installation at Victoria Museum in Melbourne
Jim Coleman (of Nightingale at Large fame) made the following comment to an earlier post on Ocularcentrism. His insights are too provocative to lay hidden in the folds of this blog:
I wanted to be sure you noticed …the article in the April 16th New Yorker by John Calapinto on the language of the Piraha, a small Brazilian hunter-gatherer tribe living on two small Amazon tributaries.
The piece is mainly about Dan Everett’s linguistic studies of the Piraha language—an exceeding “simple” language—and various linguistic controversies, Chomsky, etc., such as doesn’t a language that shows no use of “recursion,” phrase nesting to build complexity, violate Chomsky’s generalization about a Universal human Grammar that has recursion as its fundamental feature.
But—for you and your Australia—note at the end of the article the insights of Everett’s former wife, also a linguist, also proficient in the Piraha language. She learned most from listing to the women sing to (teach language to) their children. In this speech even words themselves apparently disappear and only tones, lilts, clicks, and a lyric essence remains. And yet the story is told, the children learn. So, she hints at a much more modest and near mystical theory of their language.
You refer to the Aboriginal way of perceiving as a challenge to the hegemony of vision in the ocularcentrism of our culture. I’d guess the Piraha offer a somehow similar (or at least equally radical) challenge to our language-equals-thought assumptions. It is a principle of linguistics (established by the great Vergotsky, I think it is) that all human languages are completely adequate to express everything necessary for those speakers. The Piraha appear to sing stories to children that have no beginning, middle, or end. There is none of the ubiquitous nesting of phrases as in our culture and, in some sense, almost no words. To say the do not have a complete language is like saying the Aboriginal people cannot do art.
In her essay, ‘Moorditj Marbarn (Strong Magic)’, Aboriginal artist Julie Dowling quotes Jean-Paul Sartre who described the role of painting as ‘the painter paints the world only so that free men may feel their freedom as they face it’. Her belief that painting is her means of cultural and personal survival provides an important perspective to the notion that painting is alive in the broadest sense:
On a metaphysical level, the use of pigments and materials such as ochres is a sacred act coming from sacred lands. Such pigments have power because they project these same values, while we translate the many layers of meaning we possess in our minds and hearts as Indigenous peoples. Such colours create relationships between people and the land by travelling great distances throughout the world on bark boards, carved objects and on canvas.
Janet McKenzie
Mediators and Messengers: Contemporary Art in the Landscape
What a line from Sartre: “the painter paints the world only so that free men may feel their freedom as they face it.”
