How To Tell Your Arts From Your Elbow
Sydney Morning Herald
Saturday December 19, 1998
The moroph the merrier, when Pablo Picasso meets Naranurgli. Separated by geography and cultural tradition, the shape-shifting of their art would put Hollywood's sci-fi special-effects dudes to shame.
SAVAGE ISLAND HIAPO
John Pule Until January 31
FACE TO FACE
Until March 28
FOOD FOR THOUGHT
Until March 28
IMAGES FROM THE SEA
Until June 27
At Djamu Gallery: The Australian Museum at Customs House
IN THE November issue of Art In America Linda Nochlin compares female imagery in Picasso and de Kooning. It's an accessible essay, full of the blend of conservatism and risk-taking that is Nochlin's amenity as a writer. She reproduces Picasso's Woman Leaning on Elbow (1939), a privately owned oil painting depicting the artist's mistress Dora Maar. The model's face is a blob of intelligent plasticine. Yet no matter how prodded or skewed, the features retain the essence of the sitter. Were she a crook, she'd be arrested on the basis of this identikit. Even the three-fingered fist, plunging like a picador's lance into the cheek, is unmistakably Maar's.
You can tell Picasso's girlfriends by their digits: boneless flippers for Marie-Therese Walter, efficient spatulas for Jacqueline Roque, and so on. Maar seemed prone to autonomous life forms sprouting from her wrists. These were cousins to the octopus Picasso saw in the fingers of Madame Moitessier as painted by his beloved Ingres. (Everything is richly, hopelessly, contingent in Picasso.) Human and animal colonised each other in the Spaniard's cosmology, although it wasn't a notion he articulated other than pictorially. His identification with the bull and its part-human hybrid, the Minotaur, is obvious in the work, but there's no recorded instance of the inventor of Cubism claiming he was a quadruped. A stud, maybe.
Picasso's investment of the animal in the human, and the human in the animal, was all wordless instinct.
Perhaps you could argue he inherited this as an artist born within the rim of the Mediterranean, the cradle of pagan cultures that gave deities the power to inhabit the bodies, and assume the characteristics, of birds and beasts. Likewise, to turn women and men into animals, even into trees, flowers, streams and inanimate objects. Metamorphosis, after all, is a word we received from the Greeks. On the other hand, perhaps Picasso's impulse to metamorphose his subjects, willy-nilly, was just another bevelled bead in the rosary of his gifts, unique to him and therefore useless in terms of general argument.
As Australians, we don't have access to many original Picassos, so that metamorphic images such as Woman Leaning on Elbow cannot be readily assessed by us, Melbourne's Weeping Woman and Sydney's Nude in a Rocking Chair notwithstanding. But it is our distinction to be blessed in direct experience of metamorphosis as represented in the visual practices of Aboriginal artists. Their narratives, especially the ancient creation cycles of the north, commonly assign to snakes, kangaroos, goannas, bats, parrots, fish and turtles the capacity to think and speak, a residual of these creatures' previous incarnations as ancestral, definably human beings. Nor does this wealth of metamorphosis stop at biological life. Mere locality, a seemingly anonymous site in a landscape of scrub and dust, for example, can be occupied and enlivened by a specific and nameable spiritual agent.
Shape-shifting, to use a sci-fi phrase for it, occurs so regularly, and seems so instrumental, in Aboriginal mythology that we're tempted to interpret the whole of Aboriginal culture as somehow consecrated in a protocinematic phenomenon of inter-species morphing. Nothing so crass is the case, of course, but there would be hardly a traditional bark painting or contemporary acrylic-on-canvas that failed to register some possibility of transformation, whether it be bodily, psychic or even simply seasonal. In the final, spectral torrents of Emily Kame Kngwarreye, for instance, in the busy daubs and slurries of her paint, primal matter is shown in a state of evolution, or, less hierarchically, in a state of becoming.
Some of those late, linear compositions of Kngwarreye's evoke the twisting double helix of the DNA molecule, which she may not have seen in her long, remarkable life. More immediately, topographical conceptions of Kathleen Petyarre on show in the Seppelt Contemporary Art Awards at the MCA, especially the formidable My Country - Bush Seeds (1998), can leave us reeling from the optical rush of objects transmogrifying as we watch. Such a work could easily induce Stendhal's Syndrome, the unbidden, emotional collapse that follows an encounter with a masterpiece. The bush seeds of the title may well be atoms, or rather the disassembled fragments of atoms, impossibly yet perfectly envisioned at the moment of their passage into tangibility.
Among the rewards to be had from the contemplation of Aboriginal art, one of the richest resides in its motility, a term usually reserved to describe acts of motion in the zoological or botanical world. In regard to Aboriginal painting, motility can be thought of as the characteristic of change underpinning it, evidenced in both subject matter and technique. It finds stylistic expression in various ways - and these ways tend to echo regional differences and customs - from the disorienting shimmer of the cross-hatched rarrk patterns in classic western Arnhem Land barks, to the pointillist dynamic of Central Desert dot paintings. Everywhere you look across continental Australia, Aboriginal art is in movement.
Accompanying this motility, indeed caused by it, is a physical excitation that leaves the breathless, boogie-woogie rhythms of 20th-century Modernism well and truly in its wake. (The auditory sense should not be discounted as an aid to understanding Aboriginal art.) In Sydney, we're scandalously well served by such artworks, weighted with aesthetic or sacred content, and mysterious in meaning though they commonly are. They can be discovered almost by walking down the street. Not one of them is signed Picasso. Shameful quantities of artistic potboilers crowd us from every quarter, to be sure, but we don't have to travel very far or dig very deep for the real McCoy. The Yiribana Gallery at the Art Gallery of NSW, the Australian Museum, the Museum of Contemporary Art and various commercial enterprises of note, among them Utopia Art, Hogarth Galleries/ Aboriginal Arts Centre, Boomalli, Coo-ee Aboriginal Art Gallery, Caspian Gallery, Annandale Galleries and Ray Hughes Gallery, offer viewers an ever-renewing opportunity to relish the glories and complexities contained in the very best Aboriginal art. It's a reminder that the blockbusters of imported treasures which come our way by the calendar month are merely one source of aesthetic sensation, by no means the most sustaining or legitimate.
At Djamu Gallery, for example, a bark painting by Naranurgli, an artist from Croker Island in the Northern Territory, has gone on display in a somewhat didactic exhibition called Images from the Sea, nominally a part of the Olympic arts festival, A Sea Change. Naranurgli's work, collected in 1964, represents two forked-tail catfish, a dietary staple and tribal totem of the region. While the aesthetic achievement of this work is self-evident, even from the monochrome plate reproduced on this pages, it's worth discussing in detail.
If you came straight to this painting after studying a reproduction of Woman Leaning on Elbow, two things, conceivably, would strike you. First, that the images shared a certain authority of execution, indicating the mastery of their respective artists. Second, that a powerful sense of identification operated in both. Picasso's Dora Maar is ultimately himself, funny fingers, snout nose, kiss-me lips and all. Naranurgli's catfish, no less, comprise a dual embodiment of himself; a pictorial signature, if you will, by which all in his community could recognise him as a custodian of vital tribal knowledge. This recognition is not to be confused, however, with the licence to gross individualism acceded to artists in the West.
At a pinch, you might also observe that the conventions of representation underscoring the Aboriginal work were infinitely more antique and greatly more resolved than those underscoring the effort of Picasso; less anxious, too.
Woman Leaning on Elbow is an inquisitorial image. It's so deeply inflected with anatomical and spatial questions as to mimic a conundrum by Escher. Where is the neck? Which is the chin? How is the body situated in the room, if it is a room rather than a receptacle or a solid block? Most of all, what is the point of painted figures anyway? And while these questions, which are also fears, make Picasso profoundly interesting to us, they fall short of providing the cosmic certitude, the seamless sense of closure, that we derive from Naranurgli's perfect catfish.
Even without instruction in Aboriginal customary beliefs, the ordinary viewer can read these fish for information. First about the size and shape of a particular species, then about their significance as signs of the artist's, and his community's, connection to the creatures with which they shared the natural environment. The fish are shown live, seeming to swim through shallow water. Being clear, this aqueous element has been left unrepresented, though agitated or muddied flows are elsewhere a common subject in the painterly repertoire of Arnhem Land. But in a happy accident, the mottled surface of the bark - here light, there shadowy - conveys a feeling of bubbling, tidal channels. So the artist may have felt at the time, since the positioning of his fish suggests a conscious exploitation of this effect. Picasso would have advantaged himself no less enthusiastically.
Djamu Gallery: The Australian Museum at Customs House opened its doors to the paying public a fortnight ago. By all reports, the forecourt celebration that marked the occasion was a memorable piece of performative theatre, the kind of thing Sydney does well, but often the only thing.
Though make no mistake, Djamu and the whole Customs House project, including Object Galleries: Centre for Contemporary Craft, upstairs, is worth celebrating. It certainly has significance beyond tourist-board tub-thumping that you can step off a bus, train, ferry or cab at Circular Quay and find, within a few metres, exemplary items of the indigenous art of Australia and Oceania on rotational display. A huge symbolic significance attaches to the arrival of Djamu at the Quay, site of continuing colonial self-assertions across two centuries of European settlement - and no small number of disorderly New Year's Eve revels as well.
The problem - and one can't pretend there isn't one - lies in the manner in which these items are displayed. With its quartet of opening shows, Djamu has taken the museological option. With the exception of Savage Island Hiapo, the installation of objects is primarily, even disappointingly, ethnographic. That is, the objects serve to illustrate unexceptionable facts and/or assertions about groups of peoples studied on a basis of unequal otherness. Their aesthetic dimension, and to an extent their sacred purpose, are underplayed in the interest of a wishfully dispassionate presentation of material culture.
In Face to Face, Food for Thought and Images from the Sea, some breathtaking works of art, including Naranurgli's bark, are cast as rather banal teaching aids. Insult is added to this injury by an interior design high in concept but surprisingly short on sensitivity to the needs of art. Perhaps this strategy is defensible for what is essentially an annexe of a major Australian museum, but visitors to the refurbished Customs House won't be coming for an anthropology lesson. They'll want to look at beautiful things in a tasteful setting for a wee while, then spend rather more of their time in a shop. Customs House will take care of them on that score, be assured.
That said, the present exhibitions are instructive, uncluttered and more or less thoughtfully disposed. They mark a stylish start to an adventurous period in the life of an old building. Impermanent in nature, each of the shows has been conceived to enjoy a limited lifespan within the Djamu spaces, which themselves can be, and surely will be, reconfigured and refitted from time to time. Happily, metamorphosis of a museological kind has been structured into the venue's mission statement.
Djamu is an Eora word meaning "I am here", a fitting coinage from the language of the traditional owners of Sydney Harbour. How those peoples might respond to the architectural conceits and glamorous fitout of the gallery must remain for the moment a matter of conjecture, since no surviving Eora members have been traced for comment. Recent research is establishing more and more promising possibilities in that regard, however, with connections gradually being traced between the Eora and present-day Aboriginal communities in La Perouse, south-western Sydney and elsewhere. One day, perhaps, someone will come knocking on Djamu's door, and they won't feel obliged by history or protocol to pay the entrance fee. There'll be some changes then, too.
© 1998 Sydney Morning Herald