Indigenous art scandal ‘like nuclear explosion in industry’: leading critic John McDonald

John McDonald says he was not surprised to learn that white gallery assistants may have been working on Indigenous canvases in the APYACC’s studios.

John McDonald says he has always ‘struggled’ with work from the APYACC’s studios. Picture: Adam Hourigan

One of our most prominent arts critics, John McDonald, said he was not surprised to learn that white gallery assistants may have been working on Indigenous canvases in the APYACC’s studios, “and not only because rumours to that effect have been circulating for a long time”.

McDonald, who is the art critic at The Sydney Morning Herald and was previously head of Australian art at the National Gallery of Australia, made his comments not in the paper but in a news­letter on his blog.

He said a months-long investigation by The Australian, in which five artists and six gallery staff had made claims that the work of Indigenous artists were regularly painted on by white staff, including when the artists were not in the studio, had gone off “like a nuclear explosion in the industry”.

McDonald was also critical of his old institution, the NGA, saying any suggestion it could possibly conduct its investigation into artworks from the APYACC’s studio, bound for its blockbuster winter show, Ngura Pulka, “with any pretence of thoroughness with only six weeks before the show is laughable”.

 

“The NGA initially went into denial, echoing the APYACC line that a video of a white art assistant painting on a canvas simply showed her applying a ‘background wash’,” he said.

“One look at the video and it’s clear this is a laughable claim.”

The board of the APYACC and its general manager, Skye O’Meara, have consistently denied white studio staff have painted on Indigenous canvases.

The NGA on Wednesday issued new online promotional posts for the exhibition, which it billed as “celebrating the power and vitality of Anangu art and the strength of Anangu culture, community and country”.

McDonald said he had always “struggled” with work from the APYACC’s studios, which on first impressions are “big, bold and impressive” … The problem is that after one has become familiar with the paintings and the styles involved, they begin to seem repetitive – a slick product rather than an engaging work of art denoting a deep spiritual connection with country”.

“The word used in the Oz articles was ‘homogenising’ and this is spot-on,” he said.

McDonald said it was the “professionalism” of the paintings that had made them so popular and successful but that gave them “a hollow feeling”.

He also took aim at people who said it was common practice for ­assistants to work on major artist’s paintings. “This may be OK for artists such as Ben Quilty, who has been one of the most prominent champions of the APY collective, but there’s a world of difference between a white artist telling assistants what to do, and an Indigenous artist taking instructions from white advisers,” he said.

“When paintings are being marketed as authentic expressions of an artist’s Tjukurpa, there’s no way a white assistant should be ‘juicing them up’, as we hear in the Oz video.”

He said the tragedy and danger of the scandal was the pall cast over the entire industry at a time when Indigenous art was taking the world by storm; any investigation needed to be worked through with maximum sensitivity.

“Does this make a villain of The Australian, or justify the reticence of all the other media outlets?” he said. “No. It’s the task of journalism to report truthfully on such matters … If there is deception involved, the media should not make a collective decision to pass over the issue because it’s important to ‘support’ the industry, the NGA, or some other entity,” he said.

“Already one can see that the strategy of a blanket denial is not going to work in the face of video evidence and multiple testimonies. Instead, it seems there will be a concerted effort to direct attention away from APY towards other problems in the industry, such as the ‘carpetbaggers’, who operate as free agents outside of the art centre system. Alas, this is old news which won’t push the current scandal off the front page without a lot of help from media friends.”

He said while editorial pages of The Australian were routinely “tainted by right-wing idiocies”, it was one of the few places willing to do a big investigative story on the arts. “My own paper, the SMH, has fallen into the trap of feeling it has to be ‘supportive’ of institutions such as the NGA, running a week-long “campaign” to argue the case for more government funding,” he said.