An epic in the making
AFTER a show in Japan that wowed royalty, Australians have the opportunity to appreciate Emily Kame Kngwarreye.
A COUPLE of years before the death of Emily Kame Kngwarreye, Margo Neale decided someone had to act. "Every Tom, Dick and Harry, it seemed, was having retrospectives by the time they were 36 years old," Neale says. "It seemed negligent of Australia to have such an extraordinary talent, nationally acclaimed, and no one was going to do a retrospective." Kngwarreye, who died in 1996, had been awarded the Australian Artists Creative Fellowship by then prime minister Paul Keating in 1992, but there was still no move to honour her achievements with a big show.
"It occurred to me, here was this elderly pre-eminent artist, nobody, it seemed was going to give her a retrospective before she died," says Neale, curator of the retrospective of Kngwarreye's work in Canberra.
It was a complex time for indigenous art. The problems with "fakes and frauds" were causing uncertainty, as was the role of the artist in indigenous communities, where the ethos supported group practice above solo effort. "It was all a bit sensitive," Neale says, "and more than that there were dealer rivalries. She may pass away before the show, and the copyright issues would be fraught. I had to be courageous and expect things to go wrong. If they had, it could have been the end of my career. It was all so potentially volatile at the time."
In fact, the Kngwarreye show at the Queensland Art Gallery in 1998 was the beginning of a path that led Neale, this year, to curate a blockbuster Kngwarreye show in Osaka and Tokyo, a slightly smaller version of which opens tomorrow at the National Museum of Australia. Now the museum's principal adviser on indigenous matters, Neale resisted the call to curate another such show for many years, after the marathon effort she had put into the exhibition in Queensland, but she eventually succumbed. In the end, she just could not resist the passionate persistence of the director of the National Museum of Art in Osaka, Akira Tatehata. But it took him nearly 10 years to achieve it.
Neale, born in Sale, in Gippsland, went to art school in Melbourne, where she met her husband, both of them eventually moving into teaching. With "one eye on the opening of the National Gallery in Canberra", which would take place in 1982, the Neales went to teach up north in places such as Christmas Island, Arnhem Land and the central desert. This was in the 1970s, when the homeland movement was under way, heralding the era of arts centres.
"We didn't realise how early we were in all this," she says of the Aboriginal art movement. "By the time I got to the Art Gallery of NSW in 1994, I was saying there was no doubt the value of Aboriginal art would surpass the value of other Australian art, the Boyds and the Nolans, and people said I was being stupid. But I could see, it could only grow."
A Kngwarreye painting sold at auction in July this year for $1.1 million, a record for Aboriginal art. Back in 1998, Neale knew that the QAG show would set the prices for Kngwarreye's work on the upward spiral, predicting they would quickly double. In several cases they increased tenfold. "I knew I had to be totally accountable," Neale says, "and not cut a single corner. I couldn't afford to have anyone pissed off. I was forced quite a few times to swallow my pride and be courteous to people who I felt were exploitative of Emily. My mantra was to get the best Emilys wherever they were for her sake, no matter who had them."
Neale calls Kngwarreye Emily because that's the way the artist, who only began working on canvas when she was almost 80, was known. Emily was in the last year of her life when Neale started work on the first show in Queensland, and it was important to the curator that the artist approve of how it was shaping, even if she was so frail it was unlikely she would live to see the results.
"I really wanted her to know it was happening and to have her imprimatur," Neale says. "She was very pleased, and wanted to do a last painting for the show, even though she was too frail to do anything really big."
Neale is often asked how well she knew Emily, as people try to get closer to an artist whose work impresses itself on them so seductively. But Neale only met her a few times, deciding instead to work through people who had known her for many years and whom she trusted. "I didn't want to be another humbugger," she says, "yet another person from down south wanting another piece of Emily."
When the show was eventually hung, two years after Kngwarreye's death, the sight of the big dramatic works moved Tatehata, visiting from Osaka, to tears. "He has a liberated mind, a poetic heart and fire in his belly," Neale says of the Japanese professor. "He instantly fell in love with Emily's work, and because he loved the selection and the way the exhibition was designed, he was determined to get me to bring a show to Japan."
Neale's life took a different turn, however, soon after the QAG show. After a bout of illness, and a move out of art galleries into a museum in Canberra, she thought "those days were well and truly over". Unbeknown to her, however, Tatehata was pursuing his desire to get Emily's work to Japan, and not just to any gallery, but to the National Art Centre in Tokyo, a venue that plays host to blockbuster exhibitions of the big names in international art.
Year after year, Neale would be approached through government agencies, asking her to curate an exhibition in Japan. She'd tell them it wasn't for her, and to stop asking. "I'm over it, go somewhere else," she told them, until, eventually, she found herself sitting beside Tatehata at a dinner. He was surprised to discover he had the very woman who could make his dreams come true right beside him. She told him: "Listen, mate, for all sorts of reasons, I just can't," and referred him to other curators from the major galleries.
Eventually, with the encouragement of then federal arts minister Rod Kemp, Neale agreed, but only after she'd told everyone concerned just how difficult it would be to pull off such a show. She wanted, in particular, a degree of independence and responsibility for managing all aspects of the show, so that she could work swiftly and efficiently within the short timeframe.
Craddock Morton, the director of the NMA, supported her, and she set to working with the Japanese who must have thought "these Australians are hard yakka", Neale says. "I was firm in saying, this is a partnership, we have to meet halfway. Let's not start off with positions like, 'That's not the way we usually do it,' because neither side had ever done an Australia-Japan blockbuster so we all had to work differently." Kngwarreye was prolific in the eight years she spent painting on canvas, producing more than 3000 works. But when Neale went to see the spaces in Japan which would host the show, she thought, "What have I done? There was half a kilometre of pristine white walls, alongside which I was instantly dwarfed. I thought, had Emily done enough top-shelf work to fill this 2000sq m space? And then I thought, 'Well, at least I won't have to cut back on what I want to show.' But then, as I went on the journey again to find her works, I uncovered many more, and in the end, had too many again."
The Osaka show was the off-Broadway opening. By the time it moved to Tokyo, the Crown Prince and his wife as well as the Empress herself had visited the Kngwarreye show, bringing with them intense media interest and queues of people. The Osaka gallery, accustomed to a couple of hundred visitors a day, was catering for 3000-4000 by the end of the show. In Tokyo, people stood in front of paintings for hours at a time. One woman told Neale she was puzzled by the fact Emily's work made her feel so hungry, until she realised she'd lost track of time and missed lunch. Another had revisited 10 times, outlaying the equivalent of $150 in entry fees.
"Who would have thought this would happen," Neale says, as the National Museum prepares to welcome Australian visitors to the exhibition, which "tells the story of an extraordinary Australian".
"Everyone's talking about her now in terms that have released her from the local to the global, so the discussion doesn't have to be bound by political correctness about Aboriginality (though these are critical issues as well). "What would be sensible now is for gallery directors to go internationally and say, 'You've seen Emily, so you know what we've got in Australia. If you like it, we've got more."'
Utopia: The Genius of Emily Kame Kngwarreye opens at the National Museum of Australia, Canberra, tomorrow.