Ancient style with contemporary edge

VISUAL ART: Bardayal "Lofty" Nadjamerrek. Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney. Until March 20, 2011.

Relatives of the late Bardyal "Lofty" Nadjamerrek at the Museum of Contemporary Art at The Rocks. Picture: Bob Barker.

VISUAL ART: Bardayal "Lofty" Nadjamerrek. Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney. Until March 20, 2011.

IT may seem odd, even paradoxical, that the work of an Aboriginal painter working in an age-old style derived from cave art and bark painting should be shown at a museum devoted to contemporary art.

This is symptomatic of several unresolved issues concerning the nature of contemporary art, as well as deep and often unspoken questions about the way that we should view Aboriginal art.

Does contemporary art simply mean the art made today or does it have a particular style and, if so, how can that style or movement be defined in all its evident diversity?

In a story last week about the Brisbane Gallery of Modern Art's new survey of contemporary art, we read about "absolute inclusiveness" and other carefully crafted slogans, carrying, as usual, all the intellectual weight of the fashionista's declaration that hems are up or down, black in or out, colour back or not.

Inclusion - the term is meant to sound warm and progressive - doesn't really mean openness, of course; any practice deemed conservative or traditional may be excluded at the discretion of the little club of curators and academics who run the institutions. Some contemporaries are more contemporary than others.

But although the multinational avant-garde is increasingly involved with corporate culture and big money, it still claims to represent values that are bohemian, idealistic and left of centre.

So it has to embrace Aboriginal art, even if it is quintessentially conservative and traditional.

Bardayal "Lofty" Nadjamerrek (1926-2009), who died during the preparation of this survey at Sydney's Museum of Contemporary Art, was heir to the ancient practice of rock and bark paintings of Arnhem Land, and is said to be the last contemporary to have added to the series of rock-face paintings there.

This is a tradition in which artist, subject, place, occasion and materials are all ceremonially determined, and one would not venture to paint in such a setting without the appropriate cultural sanction.

Important as he was within his tradition, Bardayal may never have come to the attention of a wider audience without the intervention of European art advisers. Whether it is ultimately beneficial or harmful for an artist to come to the attention of an audience outside their own context is another question, beyond the scope of this review.

But we can see in the course of this exhibition how Bardayal responded to these new opportunities.

The earliest works, on bark, date from the late 1950s to the 70s and are the most effective; one can see, in fact, how the outside demand for his work and the encouragement to do more of it initially stimulated the artist, whose style became more refined and confident without losing its connection to deep roots of ceremony and belief.

Some of the later works, executed on paper around 1991-92, especially those that combine the X-ray bark painting style with handprints that belong to the language of rock art, seem rather contrived; perhaps significantly, that eclecticism is abandoned in the works of his later years.

The best of Bardayal's pictures are remarkably alive with expression, with a vibrancy of feeling, indeed, that can arise only within a highly conventional style because its circumscribed visual idiom makes the images sensitive to slight variations of form or intention.

Animals, such as the pair of sugar gliders from 1970, are strikingly captured, an incomparable sense of life arising from the taut balance between naturalism and stylisation.

The human figures are even more intriguing, especially in Mimis Dancing (1970) or Ceremony with Women Taking Part (c. 1970).

Once again, although highly stylised and painted in the conventional X-ray style, the two dancing mimis are full of surprising movement, torsos tilted to one side, legs raised, heads thrown back.

In Ceremony with Women, the figures are not simply dancing in a row but differentiated and interacting, especially through the sway and momentum of the whole body.

Other images are more sinister, such as the confrontation between two black mimis armed with woomeras and spears, or the mysterious spirit called Balanjdarrangalanj, who has three fingers and three toes, and delicately holds the head of a deadly black snake between two of his fingers, while another coils between his legs.

Despite this liveliness, and the general tendency to what could be considered a natural vertical orientation, figures also can be assembled almost at will to make up the composition, even upside-down if necessary.

The human, spirit and animal figures are executed with great delicacy in the simplest range of natural ochres, and the background is entirely filled in with dark reds and browns; there is no empty space, nothing left indefinite in this visual world, any more than in the corresponding domain of spiritual belief.