John Mawurndjul: I am the old and the new, Museum of Contemporary Art
This remarkable artist stands firmly between two artistic traditions: his style evokes sophisticated visual tension.
John Mawurndjul is a remarkable artist whose work not only brings his ancestral stories vividly to life in all their numinous and pre-rational presence but leads the attentive viewer into a meditation on the art of painting itself and the origins of image-making. He is a man in whom, as the title of the exhibition implies, the old and the new coincide. In the documentary film that accompanies the exhibition, Mawurndjul speaks in his own language, interspersed with the occasional English expression. Language is culture; his traditions are not just something he has been told about, they have been directly transmitted to him in their original tongue, as he recalls things told to him by his father, who also gave him his name.
In one episode of the documentary, he talks about the paintings in a rock shelter, identifying the figures as Mimih spirits, beings that, as we later learn, are potentially powerful yet also physically frail and capable of being broken by the wind, so that they seek shelter in rocky outcrops and venture out only when conditions are still. Although the paintings were made by long-departed ancestors, he has no hesitation in interpreting them in a naturalistic and anthropomorphic way, explaining that they have killed and are cooking a kangaroo, while the children are crying because they are hungry and demanding food.
A professional anthropologist would not discuss such a scene in this way, but for Mawurndjul the stories are in a sense still present and can thus be seamlessly interpreted in such everyday terms. At the very core of the Aboriginal idea of what used to be called the Dreamtime is that the ancestral spirits and creation figures are still present in the world around us, hidden in the land or dwelling within the people living today. These beliefs are spiritual and poetic, not philosophical or subject to logical rigour, so it is not surprising to see that there are slight slippages between different explanations of the same being or the same phenomenon. Thus on one occasion we hear that the white ochre used in the paintings is the excrement of the rainbow serpent, Ngalyod; a little later we hear that it may be her eggs.
All mythological traditions are woven through with such strictly inconsistent alternatives, the result of oral transmission by many different voices over long periods of time.
But the sense of the presence of these mythic beings within nature is powerfully evoked in several episodes, including one in which it is explained that springs arise and form pools at spots where the surface of the earth has been pierced by the serpent; and the serpent is believed to be still sleeping somewhere below, just out of sight. One painting depicts a pair of serpents entwined within the same pool, unable to leave, although they can raise their heads out of the water at times.
In all of this we can see one of the deepest motivations of art, which is to explain the phenomena of the world around us and to assimilate the facts of nature into narratives with a human significance. In painting, this means representing elements of the world around us but also transforming, translating them into artificial images. This is why all art, even after the later development of what we think of as naturalistic representation, remains poised between evocative likeness and memorable unlikeness. In Mawurndjul’s serpents, for example, certain semi-naturalistic details, like the teeth, suggest frightening power, while the flatness and patterning emphasise the artificiality of something made by the human hand.
Our appreciation of art is greatly enhanced by awareness of the processes by which it was made, and in this case it is particularly important to understand how Mawurndjul uses the traditional materials and processes of rarrk painting (the crosshatching style is common in Arnhem Land) to achieve an absorbing effect of optical patterning.
As always, the first thing to consider is the support, the material on which the painting is made. In Europe, early modern artists painted in fresco on the walls of buildings, or on wooden panels or, later, canvas; in China, ink paintings were executed on paper or silk; the rarrkpainters work on large sheets of bark, cut from trees, cured over fire and flattened with rocks.
The pigments used are all from the earth. The white, already mentioned, is a white clay that has to be dug from the ground and appears to be relatively scarce; black, on the other hand, being charcoal, is common. The reds and yellows are natural ochres, soft claylike rock coloured by iron oxide. These colours are the most ancient of all and, as they are easily found in nature, almost universal. Pliny the Elder wrote in his Natural History that the great painters of antiquity — that is the great Greek painters, long before his own time — used only four colours: white, black, yellow and red.
Recent scholarship in the history of languages suggests the first colour terms to appear in all cases are black and white: that is, the differences between lightness and darkness. The first properly chromatic term, in all cases, is red. The second is either yellow or green; blue comes only after that. Thus light and dark are more fundamental in human experience than any colour, and of colours red is the first because of its associations with blood and life; but black, white and red are also the easiest colours to represent with pigments readily found in nature.
At any event, Pliny’s declaration that the best ancient painters employed only these four colours, with the implication that it was lazy and decadent to avail oneself of a more opulent and diverse palette, led many Renaissance artists to demonstrate the surprising richness of effects that could be obtained with such limited means, specifically without green and blue, the first of which could be suggested by a mixture of black and yellow, and the second by black and white, because of the bluish hue often found in black. Some of Titian’s late works can be understood in a completely new way if we examine them in this light. And painters even today will recognise that, apart from the still fundamental black and white, all the earth colours on their palette are essentially ochres or oxides, whether called yellow ochre or more recent and evocative names inherited from the Renaissance, such as raw and burnt sienna, and raw and burnt umber.
Just as important for Mawurndjul’s paintings is the precise and refined technique by which these colours are applied. This is explained, but also illustrated, in the documentary. At one point he talks about looking at the newly prepared bark and wondering what he will paint on it. As for any artist, this is not just a matter of thinking up the motif but also working out the composition, and for an artist who takes no account of naturalistic space, this means a design that will fill the whole pictorial area.
In many of the earlier works, creatures such as rainbow serpents coil around, filling the whole picture area as though crammed into a box. In many later works, the motifs are more sparsely deployed, with larger areas of background patterning.
The figure elements are clearly sketched first and then, as he says, the first colour applied is white. The pigment is ground, apparently mixed with water and glue, and then painted on with small handmade brushes.
Next the black is applied, forming the major outlines, like the lead cames in stained-glass windows.
Finally, the delicate colour-hatching, the most important, refined and admired aspect of this style, is applied with minutely thin brushes made from stalks of grass. This is clearly the most time-consuming phase of the work, which must be executed with perfect attention because mistakes cannot be erased.
It is virtuoso work and reminds us that in tribal arts, as in other traditions, there is a clear discrimination between work produced with refinement and skill and work that is clumsy or careless. Mawurndjul is well aware that he is a master, unequalled at producing the distinctive aesthetic effect that is admired in rarrkpainting: a kind of irresistible, tingling optical animation that he describes with a word that is translated into English as “shimmering”.
What creates this shimmering, at first glance, seems to be the myriad tiny flecks that speckle the surface of the painting. But when we look more closely we realise that those tiny flecks are just the minute, diamond-shaped interstices left between the opposing diagonal hatching lines.
If we look more closely still, we become aware of a more subtle and elusive effect: in any given patch of rarrkhatching, bands of colour seem to shift from white to ochre to black, and yet somehow to maintain an underlying sense of continuity through change.
The way that this is achieved, we gradually realise, is that all the lines on one diagonal will be painted, for instance, in yellow ochre; then the opposite diagonals will be painted in alternating bands of white, red ochre, black and so on, so that the underlying continuity of the yellow ochre seems to make the changing colours melt into each other harmoniously.
Mawurndjul is aware that his rarrkis exceptionally complex and refined: “Inside,” he says with evident satisfaction, “there is another secret layer.” This kind of sophisticated visual tension is also evoked in another feature of Mawurndjul’s style that would otherwise be hard to explain.
Backgrounds or the bodies of symbolic figures are divided up by an arbitrary grid-like a patchwork; these boundaries are crossed by lines or waves of colour-hatching, but these waves do not always join up with perfect continuity on either side of the boundary line.
Sometimes they are just slightly out of register, at other times they are much more distinctly offset, leaving no doubt that the discontinuity is a deliberate aesthetic effect. It is in fact another aspect of the “shimmering” effect, creating a restless and stimulating sense of visual animation.
But this animation is not mere stylistic virtuosity. It draws in the viewer in an almost hypnotic way, and imbues the stylised mythical creatures of the paintings with a vibrant sense of life. For Mawurndjul is acutely aware of dwelling between two worlds, the old one of tradition and the new one of the balanda, the white people whose name comes from the Macassarese deformation of Hollander.
The old people and the old ways lie buried, he says, but we must hold on to their words and their stories. His art is one of memory, an exercise in anamnesis, recounting, in his own words, “stories from long ago which the paintings do not forget”.
John Mawurndjul: I am the old and the new
Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney.
Until September 23.
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