Mapping the terrain of Western Desert Aboriginal art

ABORIGINAL art has been an extraordinary phenomenon during the past few decades, attracting unprecedented interest across the world.

Clifford Possum Tjapaltjarri

ABORIGINAL art has been an extraordinary phenomenon during the past few decades, attracting unprecedented interest across the world.

But it has also become such big business, so overshadowed - as the endless series of fat and opulent catalogues from the auction houses remind us - by dealing, investment and speculation, not to mention overproduction and the kind of uncritical praise that is always faintly condescending, that it is hard not to feel some uneasiness about the whole field.

Nonetheless, Tjukurrtjanu, which will travel to the Musee du Quai Branly in Paris later next year, is a serious and important exhibition, accompanied by a thorough and beautifully produced catalogue, which takes us back four decades and deals with the origins of the Papunya Western Desert painting movement when Geoffrey Bardon, a schoolteacher, gave the men in Papunya acrylic pigments and encouraged them to paint the dreamings they had previously designed in sands and ochres.

It is a remarkable story, of the adaptation of timeless designs to modern materials, of what had existed in ephemeral form to a permanent one, and of course of something that had had no commercial value into a commodity that would be seized on by a jaded art market in search of new sources of authenticity. Significantly, too, the case of Aboriginal art is unique: there is no other indigenous tradition that has made a comparable transition or achieved anything like the same financial success.

That success was certainly not a foregone conclusion. The designs the Papunya elders began to paint in acrylic were not generally understood or even intelligible. They were - and indeed are - obscure mnemonics that record or allude to more or less secret knowledge that is meant to be possessed by individuals having attained a certain level of initiation; in preliterate cultures all knowledge must be held in the minds of particular people, and successive stages of initiation entail access to higher or more secret categories of knowledge.

The subject of that knowledge was the mythology associated with particular places. Cultures such as this have no conception of historical duration, so the time of myth is directly overlaid on the here and now; the mythical or totemic ancestor figures are still present and remain active in the land they created in the first place. At the same time the identity of each individual is directly tied to land and to totemic spirits, which is why Aborigines have such an intimate attachment to particular places, and also why - a fact that sometimes puzzled the early settlers -- they are reluctant to venture into lands they are prohibited for ceremonial reasons from entering.

The patterns they began to paint, then, were like topographic maps of the terrain to which they belonged. There is no horizon because they are not in any sense views of the land, nor is there any idea of the standing viewer looking out towards a vanishing point, sightline parallel to the ground, which underpins geometrical perspective. The Aboriginal viewpoint is like an aerial one, except that too is misleading, since it is in reality the tracing of paths walked on foot from one place to another.

A better analogy is probably the map of an underground railway system, which is a schematic picture of links and connections, rather than an accurate and proportional representation of the distance or even the strict direction between points.

The points in question often seem to be waterholes - all-important in desert country - but may also be meeting places or in other cases the imagined journey of some edible plant as it propagates through the land. At the same time, these networks are also the schematic recollection of the mythical stories that tell of the creation of the land and remain present in it; sometimes the lines are the pathways taken by an ancestral figure as he crossed the land giving it its distinctive character.

Aesthetically, there are two distinct elements to these paintings, which are harmoniously reconciled in the most successful examples. The first is the symbolic schema and the second is the decorative patterning that surrounds it. In some of the earliest paintings there is little more than a summary schematic pattern on a flat background, but very soon the intervening space is filled with lines or, more characteristically in the end, dots often applied in different colours or tones and creating a distinctive effect.

Among the first, it seems, to recognise the power of the overall dot-patterning were the Tjapaltjarri brothers, Tim Leura and Clifford Possum. In several small but fine pictures from as early as 1972, they have already developed a subtle cloud-like pattern of dots that overlays the symbolic schemata and holds them together compositionally. A kind of horror vacui leads to the filling of every possible space on the picture surface, except in a certain number of cases where the dotting fills the area of the sacred pattern, but leaves a margin of emptiness between that and the edge of the panel.

It was no doubt as much the overall dot pattern as the underlying schemata that fascinated Western observers, for while the mythological map is unintelligible without explanation, the clouds of dots are visually hypnotic. The more rudimentary and undecorated panels do not have the same effect. Yet it is really the combination that proved irresistible: modern Western audiences could encounter images that were resonant with the beliefs of an inconceivably ancient culture - one that predated not only metals, ceramics, the wheel, but even agriculture itself - and all in a beguilingly decorative form.

Although the exhibition is mostly confined to works of the early 1970s, it ends with a couple of larger compositions by Clifford Possum Tjapaltjarri and Tim Leura Tjapaltjarri, Warlugulong (1976) and Spirit Dreaming (1980). Their superiority as artists, in comparison to most of the others in the exhibition, is beyond doubt. Both of these impressive works, but the later one to an even greater extent, demonstrate remarkable sophistication in design, in the handling of composition and patterning, and in the management of a diverse yet harmonious palette.

The success of Clifford Possum and his brother, however, has led to the principal problem with the reception of Aboriginal art since that time: it has become all too easy to read it as decorative abstraction, so that paradoxically work that is inherently and intentionally obscure to non-initiates - for these are, as already noted, esoteric images in the proper sense of the term - appears deceptively accessible to collectors and may even find itself hung beside vacuous Western abstractions.

The paradox is double because, despite the facile but, for the art market, supremely convenient misunderstanding of Aboriginal art as abstract, it is clear that the quality of these paintings, as with any work of religious or spiritual inspiration, is indissociable from the belief of the artist in the reality of the world that he is depicting. As in any comparable case, it is spiritual belief that gives the work its focus and intensity, even if the artist is also motivated by the perfectly reasonable need to earn his living.

One of the inevitable questions must be about the future of the tradition. The most prominent of its exponents came from a cultural environment only superficially touched by Western influence. They also grew up when traditional Aboriginal social structures had not been undermined to the extent they have been more recently by the abuse of alcohol and other substances, endemic violence and the baleful influence of the trashiest aspects of Western commercial culture.

Most of these founding artists have died, and it remains to be seen whether individuals of a similar degree of inspiration will emerge from the Aboriginal communities that have been so deeply damaged. Will future artists arise only in rare pockets of relatively untouched Aboriginal culture? At the same time, to make matters more complicated, the future of the Aboriginal people clearly lies in engaging with the modern world and not in remaining in cultural reservations on its fringes; but this will take them even further from the reality of ancestral beliefs, just as it has taken us far from the religious beliefs of our own forebears.

Meanwhile, a related problem was raised by a respected scholar in this field last year: he pointed out that the Aboriginal art being made for the insatiable art market is not even seen by Aboriginal communities. It is made and shipped out for sale to Western and international collectors. In this sense, as he pointed out, there is no longer an Aboriginal audience for Aboriginal art. This art is no longer nurturing in its own people the beliefs that it reflects, and thus runs the risk, in turn, of becoming increasingly disconnected from those roots of popular belief.

One of the ironies of the reception of Aboriginal work in the past decade or two has been the attempt to market it as contemporary art. This would be unobjectionable, of course, if the term contemporary were used in the neutral sense, to denote whatever art is being made today. But in practice the contemporary art establishment has tacitly agreed that only certain sorts of work qualify as truly contemporary. Mostly these are packaged and promoted through a rhetoric of deconstruction, questioning, breaking down of conventions and traditions.

Aboriginal art, as the expression of a culture that could not possibly be more conservative, traditional and conventional, poses a conundrum, at least for anyone not blinkered by ideology.

The contradiction, as Marxists would say, is real and ineluctable. Every time you see an exhibition in which contemporary art is juxtaposed with Aboriginal painting, you are confronted with the contrast between work that believes in nothing and work that arises entirely from belief. And it's not hard to see which category carries the greater conviction.

Tjukurrtjanu: Origins of Western Desert Art
Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, Melbourne, until February 12