Bark with bite
They are meditating is a testament to the artistic vitality - and artistic variety - of Aboriginal Australia.
By Richard Cooke
Keith Munro is one of a new crop of indigenous curators changing the way Aboriginal art is presented. Along with Djon Mundine, he has organised the first comprehensive showing of one of the great treasures of indigenous Australia art (and one of the largest collections of bark paintings in the world), the Arnott's collection. Donated by the famed biscuit company in 1987, it has never been shown at this scale before, with more than 200 works on display. The huge amounts of research required have halted any previous showing. "I think that was important to make sure we got that right," says Munro. "And it has taken some time to realise, but it is something that with the publication can compliment the show, will give the collection and the artists justice.
One of the first things you notice is what's not here - mountains of text. Walking out of an exhibition under the cumulative weight of room sheets, essays, programmes and extended captions, it's easy to feel you've read a book, not seen a show. It breeds a habit of viewing where the caption is analysed before the image, something the curators wanted to avoid.
Munro says there was a strong desire to remove the "ethnographic" element that so often dogs displays of indigenous art. A refreshing tack of returning the focus to the work.
How should the uninitiated approach Aboriginal bark art? "I'd ask people to look at the work," says Munro. "And really focus on how they engage with it, and the types of things they may like in a particular work, and look at their interest and use it as a starting point or a reference, to engage with artistic styles and differences and variations and dynamics, from the artists and different genres and media that are employed."
You can start, for example, with the distinctive black background on the works from Groote Eyelandt, in the Gulf of Carpentaria, a dark tar colour that brings out the stark whites and dried-blood reds of the ochre on top.
"The black pigment is made with manganese," says Munro, "and that metal that brought miners to the island, which affected the local Aboriginal community enormously". It was also an early refuelling site for QANTAS, and one of the first places that white Australians started to develop appreciation for Aboriginal art. Collectors sparked an art boom in the region after the Second World War, which Munro links to the long tradition of Aboriginal trade there. "This area saw trade between Aborigines and Macassans [Indonesian islanders] for hundreds of years... right up until 1907."
The initiative and complexity on show here are linked to another aspect of the show - personality. Instead of just ascribing these barks to regions or styles, Munro wants to examine the role of artists in the paintings as well. "I hope to introduce people to the lives of these artists, and the important context in which they've contributed to a richer cultural heritage by being included in this collection and being donated to this institution," he says. "When we go to a Picasso exhibition, we know something about the man, about his life and we can relate the work to the personality that produced it." It was Picasso himself who, when confronted with the work of Yirawala (the artist Munro calls a "gem" of the collection) declared: "this is what I've been trying to do all my life." Yirawala, who worked at a frenzied pace trying to preserve the elements and traditions of a culture under threat from Western encroachment, is just one of the powerful people who leaves his mark on the show.
Some of the most poignant personal stories are fragments, like the tale of Christopher Pugar, who worked on the mission at Wadeye (formerly Port Keats), 200km from Darwin. He fell from a horse and became paralysed in the mid-1930s, a fate his clansmen thought was divine punishment. Painting far from his home, only one work of his survives, called Life.
An artist like Pugar brings a system of law, religion, family and ceremony to his art; how an outsider can approach that respectfully is one of the most complex questions in this exhibition. Munro likens the layers of meaning to layers of an onion: "The outer layers might be appreciated by people who recognise them as animals, hunting guides or creation stories; then there might be a significance that only the initiated can appreciate, then a final layer that only can be understood by the artists themselves, or senior law-men."
Most exhibitions begin with a "whiting out", where the walls of the gallery of institution are painted white. They are meditating started with a "blacking out", where the entrance to the show was painted black, in preparation for an installation by Richard Birrinbirrin and David Dharrapuy. It represented not only the Aboriginal body (the installation was based on ceremonial body painting), but also the "hidden" religious element of the ceremony. The show takes its title from a quote from Raymattja Marika. "When old people paint, it is as if they are meditating; it is not just a man painting a design, but the design is a real, meaningful and alive totem, which communicates with the painter. There is communication going on."
We might not be able to know with the unknowable, but here's a rare opportunity to commune with the meditating.