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© Donald Richardson
,January, 2007
In Paris in June, President Jacques Chirac opened a new ethnographic
museum, the Musée du Quai Branly, thus achieving one of
his hopes for immortality. Built on the banks of the Seine and
designed by eminent French architect, Jean Nouvel, the museum
collects two separate state holdings of what used to be known
as 'primitive art' (l'art primitif) but which the French
- mindful of the thousands of former colonials who live in metropolitan
France - are now calling 'first art' (l'art premier).
Of course, in this century, 'primitive' is a factually questionable
- as well as a politically incorrect - term: it is no longer
possible to claim that a pre-industrial people is more 'primitive'
than one that incinerates millions of its own citizens.
Australian art bureaucrats are making much of the fact that the
building features works by eight contemporary Aboriginal artists.
The contribution of these artists was funded by the Australian
Government and a donation from the Harold Mitchell Foundation.
President Chirac personally asked our Prime Minister to commission
the works. An integral and permanent part of the building's fabric,
the work is painted on walls, ceilings and columns and much of
it can be seen from the street through the windows - both by
day and night, due to twenty-four-hour illumination.
It certainly is a significant achievement for our indigenous
art, but to claim (as some have) that it is 'reverse colonisation'
or, even, a vicarious 'sorry' statement, can only be a confirmation
of the provincialism of those who make these claims. Actually,
French reports of the building hardly mention the murals at all.
Most of the artists are well-known in Australia, but the transformation
of their oeuvres from bark or canvas has necessitated some distortions
which do not always honour the essence of their traditions. Some
are in cramped situations and others are fragmented, being treated
as if they were wall-paper. Curiously, most reporting on them
treats them as a homogeneous whole, whereas they represent very
distinct Aboriginal art traditions; similarly, it fails to identify
the work of the individual artists.
On one ceiling, Gulumbu Yunupingu, sister of the rock
singer, Mandawuy Yunupingu, of Yothu Yindi fame, has painted
Garak - The Universe, a close pattern of thousands of
symbolic stars in the form of black crosses and white dots on
a red ochre ground. On another, and on a pole in the bookshop,
John Mawurndjul, from Maningrida, has created an enlargement
of a bark-painting (Mardayin at Milmilngkan), while the
pole is a simulation of a hollow-log coffin. Ningura Napurrula
has covered the walls and ceiling of a corridor with typical
Pintupi concentric circles and hand-drawn lines in thick, black-on-white
impasto. Pitjantjatjara artist, Tommy Watson, has scaled
up a typical Western Desert acrylic of his grandfather's country,
derived from the ground-drawing tradition.
All are striking surfaces - some overpoweringly so - but the
gross enlargement from what are essentially small, portable forms
has distorted them somewhat: the dots of the central desert works
have had to be rendered centimetres across and the cross-hatched
rarrk has acquired an uncharacteristic mechanical precision.
Judy Watson's foyer ceiling is based on her painting,
Two Halves with Bailer Shell, which is in the National
Gallery in Canberra, and her images engraved into the glass of
the façade of one of the buildings are derived from Aboriginal
objects made from human hair and bone that are in the British
Museum.
Lina Nyadbi's grossly over-scale pattern of simple strokes,
derived from body scarification, is etched with a simple, basic
light-dark interaction on to the massive concrete western end
of the façade. Some of the late Michael Riley's photographs,
exhibited in the book-shop area, also are visible from the street.
As the work covers 2500 square metres of wall and ceiling, the
curators - Brenda Croft, of the National Gallery in Canberra,
and Hetti Perkins, of the Art Gallery of NSW, themselves Aborigines
- had difficulty finding artists capable of working to this scale.
As it turned out, the bark-painter, Mawurndjul, was the only
artist to work personally on the massive pieces: the others were
all executed by artisans under the direction of the artists.
All were created face-up on huge pieces of canvas on the floor
then turned over and stuck to the ceilings or walls. Tommy
Watson's contribution was transferred to baked enamel on
stainless-steel tiles in Australia and freighted to Paris. Paddy
Nyunkuny Bedford's minimalist sculptural installation was
also translated in Australia.
This use of Aboriginal artists' work in the decoration of the
building was the idea of the architect, who - apparently - wanted
colour and pattern to enrich the simple surfaces of his building.
The dilemma
Europe values indigenous Australian painting and sculpture
as an expression of a living ethnic culture, rather than as art
per se: it is, after all, from the oldest continuing culture
in the world - a fact that was not lost on Jean Nouvel. This
dichotomy is discussed openly and rationally in Europe - as it
was at the prestigious Cologne Art Fair a few years ago when
the organisers were labelled 'nazis' by some for refusing Aboriginal
works on the grounds that they were 'folk art', not real art
in the contemporary Western sense. However, in Australia, the
matter is rarely discussed; instead commentators - both black
and white - tend to adopt the politically-correct attitude of
'see no evil, speak no evil'. Thus, a coherent theoretical construction
of Aboriginal work has never been developed. This is a matter
that must be addressed because Aboriginal works are being judged
in competitions alongside those by white artists and government
funding does not discriminate between the two.
Given the theoretical vacuum, the solution of the French in this
instance - to treat it as architectural decoration - is certainly
one way to go. But it has been criticised locally, the point
being raised that its quality as pattern is only the superficial
aspect of what is a deep, cultural expression. Yet, our cultural
bureaucrats have accepted Nouvel's usage without demur. We are
justified in asking why.
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