Aboriginal art: Telstra awards at Northern Territory gallery, Darwin

Truly fascinating works of indigenous art are fuelled by the artists’ deep connection to their land, not commercialism.

The land is vital to the survival of humanity — a truism, but one of which we can lose sight even as we get caught up in more abstract arguments about ecological matters. Everything we eat is grown in the earth or taken from the sea; we have to drink water and breathe air; we have to dispose of waste without compromising these resources.

These are fundamental realities, as we were brutally reminded by the date of what is called Earth Overshoot Day this year. Global Footprint Network calculates the ratio between the Earth’s biocapacity, or ability to renew its resources, and our level of consumption. Throughout the history of humanity, in spite of localised disasters caused by deforestation, erosion and overfarming, we have used up much less than the world can produce. This began to change with the growth of modern economies and populations, and 1970 was the fateful year in which we first consumed more than the natural environment could replenish.

Those who live beyond their means may find that they have in effect spent the whole of their monthly income by the 25th of the month, or the 20th, or even earlier; after that they are living on credit. In the same way, Earth Overshoot Day represents the day in the year by which we have used up the year’s biocapacity. Since 1970, the date has moved relentlessly earlier, and this year it fell on August 13. For the rest of the year we are, ecologically speaking, accumulating debt and eroding capital.

The conundrum we face is not hard to understand: overshoot means more environmental degradation, and this will mean more suffering, instability and war. At the same time we are addicted to the growth of consumption: when we hear about America’s economy picking up, for example, it means that Americans are consuming more; but in fact they are already consuming far too much, a fact symbolised by their waistlines. Our prosperity in Australia is tied to growth in China and India: but if the Chinese and Indians all consumed as much as the Americans, the results would be catastrophic.

Until the industrial revolution, most people’s lives were governed by and adapted to the rhythms of nature. The great cathedrals of the gothic age almost all have cycles of the labours of the months carved into their elaborate portals, a natural calendar of the human year: and ploughing, sowing, harvesting are still crucial themes in the paintings of Vincent van Gogh. Nomadic pastoralists, too, moved around with their livestock according to the seasons.

Hunters and gatherers had to be finely attuned to nature to understand the seasonal movements of their prey and to devise ways to hunt these animals, as well as knowing where to find edible plants and when best to collect them. In difficult environments, such as Australia, barely inhabitable across most of its area — a fact abundantly clear on the flight to Darwin — prone to bushfires in the wooded parts, poor in soil and water and even poorer in fruits and other food plants, understanding the environment was even more essential to survival.

Thus it is not surprising that the most striking feature of Aboriginal culture — more apparent than its elaborate kinship systems — is its connection to the land. We can all feel attached, more or less intimately, to certain places where we or our ancestors have lived. Odysseus longed to return home, and 1000 years after Homer the late antique author Lucian, probably a Hellenised Syrian, writes that all men love their native land, long to see it again and feel happy when they are there. But these very reflections are based on the assumption that many of his readers, as today, will live away from their homeland for professional or other reasons for much their lives.

Expatriation — temporary or permanent in the case of colonists — has long been taken for granted in Europe as in Asia. The British and the Chinese alike have moved to every part of the world, taking their culture with them, both maintaining and adapting it as the situation demanded. Aboriginal culture, on the other hand, is rooted to place.

Their sense of identity is a collective one and it is inseparable from ancestor spirits present in the land. In such a world view, your identity is connected to that of your fellow tribesmen and essentially the same as that of the ancestor who relives in you; and that continuity, in turn, is only possible in the place that belongs to that ancestor.

Other peoples, considering each generation as a new one, linked to its forebears but capable of significant change, can see both their family history and personal identity as evolving in time and largely unconstrained by place.

For the Aborigines, on the contrary, identity is repetition. Their traditional culture has little conception of linear time, since the past is always present; on the other hand, space and place are all-important.

This is why Aboriginal art is so concerned with mapping the land, and the famous dot paintings are, in their origin, like symbolic charts of the vital physical and mythical topography of a place. Except that these dot paintings are not really an old form of Aboriginal art at all but a modern product of the meeting of black and white cultures.

The old and original Aboriginal painting was in ochres on bark, representing dreamtime stories and totemic animals, but they were not collected and preserved as works of art until the appearance of white missionaries and anthropologists. The so-called dot paintings, with their symbolic cartographies, were appropriately enough originally executed in coloured ochres on the earth itself in the context of ceremonies.

It was at the suggestion of a white art adviser, Geoffrey Bardon, that they were first reproduced in acrylics for sale to collectors, and these new pictures proved to have a far wider appeal than the traditional bark paintings. They were bright, animated, conveyed a sense of conviction and meaning, albeit not properly intelligible to outsiders, and could be enjoyed — even if this was a fundamental misunderstanding — as decorative abstractions.

Since then, the new Aboriginal art has encountered extraordinary commercial success; for the international art market it represented a final frontier of pristine primitivist authenticity, and the result has been enormously profitable for dealers and auction houses, or at least it was until the global financial crisis. Meanwhile, ­curators started thinking of Aboriginal art as modern art, and then even as contemporary art, and it became de rigueur to include some in any contemporary survey or biennale.

What effect all this has had on the practice of Aboriginal art may be judged from the sample presented at the Telstra National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art Award exhibition at the Museum and Art Gallery of the Northern Territory. The show is upstairs, so it is natural to look first at the works in the permanent collection downstairs, which include some very fine examples of bark painting, including John Mawurndjul’s impressive Ngalyod the Rainbow Serpent (1988) and Peter Manalwanga’s also powerful Two Wallabies, Barrk (1979).

Both of these are strong yet highly refined in execution, painted in traditional ochres. But even the later dot paintings that employ modern synthetic pigments, such as Pansy Napangati’s Water dreaming (1989) or Kathleen Petyarre’s hypnotic Storm in Atnangker Country II (1996), are painted with great care. All these works, whether or not we understand the iconography, visibly embody confidence, assurance and patience, and are made with the kind of attention that is the mark of real belief.

The same cannot be said for the works in the exhibition upstairs. The first impression is of uneven quality, uncertain purpose, inconsistent aesthetic judgment and a gratuitous diversity of styles, each trying to draw attention to itself. On closer inspection, certain individual pieces look better, but the exhibition as a whole does not.

One the most refined paintings is Yurpiya Lionel’s Anumara, composed of slim and uneven lines of white and yellow trailing across the composition, sometimes interrupted or changing in ways that feel always alive and never mechanical. Some of the other works that attempt the slow, patient traditional style end up conveying fussiness rather than stillness, betraying a lack of conviction, and even Rerrkirrwanggur Mununggurr’s three barks are relatively slight works. Nyapanyapa Yunupingu’s Untitled avoids fussiness at the cost of impatient carelessness: it remains one of the most convincing works in the exhibition, but bears witness to the decadence of a tradition.

The dot paintings in particular seem to have been disastrously affected by overproduction and by the example of the commercial success achieved by Emily Kngwarreye and Sally Gabori, who appealed to the decorator market with big, bold and colourful designs. Barbara Mbitjana Moore’s My Country was highly commended by the judges presumably because they accepted her broad and crude brushstrokes as expressive.

This raises another question, which is the traditional mythology pictures such as this are meant to refer to. It has long been an important marketing tool to inform us that a given picture refers to a story that we cannot possibly read in the painting itself. But at least when looking at a painting such as the aforementioned Water dreaming , we can accept that the design stands as a kind of mnemonic for a narrative mapped on to a landscape.

Artists are often pressed to come up with ­titles for their works in the days before an exhibition opens, and one can’t help feeling some of these stories may have been improvised for the eager art adviser to copy down as the works were packed up for sale. Bob Gibson, however, stretches the bounds of plausibility with a picture that allegedly illustrates a complicated, meandering and anticlimactic tale of two snakes and two men, but consists of three green rectangles and a couple of rows of green squares.

The conclusion that all this suggests is hardly surprising: that traditional customs, rituals and symbols, deeply meaningful in their original contexts, have been inevitably compromised by being turned into commodities; the further the process of commodification goes, the more confidence and conviction are eroded, of necessity undermining the capacity for care and attention that we admired in the earlier paintings.

Aboriginal culture, in being assimilated to the Western idea of art and especially contemporary art as market product, has come to suffer from the same problems of overproduction and gratuitous diversification in search of a market niche. And like the overproduction of art of every kind, this is part of the wider problem discussed at the outset: all official statements about Aboriginal art insist on celebrating the growth of an industry. But art is not an industry, nor does it benefit from growth in production and consumption. The addiction to growth is as damaging here as anywhere else, and in the end culture is not a renewable resource.

The Telstra National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art Award

The Museum and Art Gallery of the Northern Territory, until November 1.