Rites and rituals in the National Indigenous Art Triennial

Ceremonies are a way in which cultures preserve traditions, especially when they suffer disruption and turmoil.

Gutingarra Yunupingu, Gumatj people, Maralitja (still), 2021

Hetti Perkins’s exhibition Ceremony is beautifully curated, and it feels almost disobliging to her to add that this is in stark contrast with the rest of the National Gallery of Australia. Large parts of the main level are closed, and the rest is mostly occupied by mediocre work. Upstairs, the Australian art collection is presented in a wilfully and ideologically confused way that makes any understanding of Australian art history impossible.

And yet even here there are pockets of coherence and occasionally interesting conjunctions. In the basement, so-called highlights of the rest of the collection are presented under a couple of rubrics: “towards abstraction” and “emotional body”. It would be a misnomer to call either of these an exhibition; the impression is rather of a museum store with works awaiting proper display.

It is a sad spectacle of dereliction in the year that the NGA is marking its 40th anniversary. Meanwhile, the gallery is spending the incredible sum of $14m – enough to build entire collections – on an oversized Lindy Lee outdoor sculpture. It’s pretty clear that this is an institution that has lost its sense of direction.

Joel Bray, Wiradjuri people, Giraaru Galing Gaanhagirri (still)

But to return to Ceremony, it was fortuitous that the Aboriginal Memorial installation of funerary logs (1987-88) was moved to its new location in the middle of the main floor only days before my visit, because it is well worth making a stop here first. These works, which were produced in the remote Arnhem Land region and are now almost half a century old, are quite literally from another world, not only for most visitors to the NGA, but even for Aboriginal people.

It is not enough to glance at them collectively as you walk through, as most people seem to do, perhaps with some banal or sentimental reflections about their significance. Look closely and you find yourself face to face with a world of belief that is immemorially old and still viscerally felt: a world teeming with animate beings, plants, animals, fish especially, and fierce predators opening their jaws to swallow smaller prey.

Most of the artists who made these poles were born between the wars, and grew up in distant areas far from the world of modern Australia; they had been exposed to some modern influences, and could not be considered in any sense “pre-contact” people, but they had not yet suffered the profound sociocultural disruption brought about since the Memorial was commissioned.

Elements of traditional social structure and belief systems appear to have remained intact, and are expressed here with unmistakeable conviction. The same is true of the technical aspect of these painted logs: the Memorial commission dates from around the same time that the new dot painting was beginning to achieve popularity, but their style and quality predate the massive commercialisation that overtook Aboriginal art in subsequent decades.

Darrell Sibosado, Bard people, Ngarrgidj Morr (the proper path to follow), 2022

Ceremony represents an entirely different and almost unrecognisable world: different in spiritual beliefs, in social life and customs, in ethnic composition and perhaps most conspicuously in artistic techniques, almost all of which are imported and modern. Thus the first vast space we enter, like an ante-room to the exhibition proper, has an impressive installation of charred logs pressed into concrete slabs, in the language of Anselm Kiefer, while the curving wall behind is covered with an installation of ceramic forms like burnt branches, evoking bush fires.

Inside, many other media are represented. There are a couple of large series of paintings, each using modern paints but adapting traditional dot and line motifs. A hi-tech version of painting has a mechanical arm moving across a vast canvas, squirting dots of ochre paint to form a phrase in an Aboriginal language. Ceramics, also an imported medium, are prominent: one set of solid clay vessels is incised with sgraffito marks, another is composed of very light bowl-like forms in paper clay, displayed on the ground and coloured with red ochres.

One of the most intriguing works is composed of daguerreotypes and small bronze objects. The daguerreotype is suggestive, because although a modern medium – the earliest form of photography – it is also almost two centuries old, and contemporaneous with the first contact between settlers and Indigenous people in many parts of the continent. Formally, too, a daguerreotype is a unique impression, not a multiple, so these little landscapes are not as inconsistent as a modern photograph would be with the bronze casts that accompany them.

The final part of the exhibition is an installation that evokes both a museum and a museum workshop. It is about the many Aboriginal words, in countless languages and dialects, that have become extinct in the course of the last two centuries or more, but have been preserved in the records of early ethnographers and others. On the workbench, for example, is a tabulation of terms recorded since the time of Governor Philip Gidley King (whose drawing of an Indigenous family was engraved by Blake), correlated with versions attested by later witnesses.

SJ Norman, Wiradjuri people, bones collected from Walgalu Country in the artist’s studio. Picture: Jake Terrey

Most of the room is occupied by display cases with bone samples – from sheep or cattle – attached to cards; each is inscribed with a lost word, noting its source, and the word is engraved on to the bone. The image of the skeletal remains of extinct languages is poignant.

A couple of video works notably illustrate the way that contemporary media can be used by artists whose relationship to Aboriginal cultural tradition is radically different. Gutingarra Yunupingu enacts an ancient ritual, but his work takes the form mostly of a panoramic and almost hypnotic video of waves breaking on a shore, seen horizontally, alternating with rills of water running up and down the sand, seen from above. All this is accompanied by a remarkable soundtrack, all the more striking when we realise that the artist himself is deaf.

Yunupingu comes from a traditional background and lives in a very remote part of Australia, Yirrkala in East Arnhem Land. Hayley Millar Baker, the author of the other video work, represents the opposite end of contemporary Indigenous experience. She is, as she has explained elsewhere, of mixed background, Anglo-Indian on her father’s side and Gunditjmara (from southwestern Victoria) and English on her mother’s side.

She presents herself in this work as a modern middle-class woman living in a stylish, inner-city house, seemingly troubled by some unconscious memory or anxiety. She wanders into the kitchen in a desultory way, then collects some charcoal from a brazier in the garden and sits on the sofa grinding it in a mortar as though in a trance. She smears the crushed charcoal over her hands to make them black and then sits on the sofa as though in meditation.

There is a surprise ending which I shouldn’t spoil if you haven’t seen it, but it is clear that in contrast to Yunupingu’s work, in which the modern medium is used to express an ancient sense of connection, Baker’s video expresses a profoundly ambivalent relationship with a tradition that is only one of several strands in her personal background. Above all, perhaps, it evokes a powerful sense of nostalgia.

Hayley Millar Baker, Gunditjmara and Djabwurrung people, Nyctinasty, 2021

Nostalgia, in turn, brings us back to the exhibition’s title. Ceremony is a way that all cultures preserve traditions, especially when they suffer disruptions and turmoil, and even when the underlying systems of belief are compromised or almost moribund. This is why even secular Jews, for example, celebrate Passover; it is why everyone in Sicily, as I have witnessed several times, celebrates Easter with elaborate processions, whether or not they are personally religious.

The modern world has been inimical to ceremony, as indeed to tradition, and for some generations educated or half-educated people have thought it clever to sneer at religious and civil ceremonies of most kinds, as though they were merely assertions of social control or vestiges of extinct beliefs. But these days at least they no longer sneer at the ceremonies and traditions of Indigenous peoples, instinctively recognising the role that these rituals play in preserving social and cultural cohesion.

The greatest problem with preserving a culture and its traditions is that culture is ultimately grounded in a way of life, whether that be hunting and gathering or farming; without that foundation in the way we actually live and work in the world of nature, it can become superficial and empty of meaning.

So the problem that Aboriginal people face, when they are no longer living the real and difficult life that produced their culture in the first place, is like a more vivid version of the same problem and malaise experienced in the modern West, where our own roots in the land and farming and grazing have been so frequently lost in the course of the last century or more. The loss of Easter traditions, for example, is not just the reflection of declining belief in conventional religion, but of a failure of connection with the ancient and pre-Christian celebration of the rebirth of nature in springtime.

And this is why Ceremony can speak to a wide and diverse audience, especially as Perkins has avoided works that express self-pity and resentment; slogans, interestingly enough, only make a token appearance at the very beginning of the exhibition, like a reminder to leave indignation at the door and enter a space for deeper and quieter reflection. In fact expressions of resentment in general represent a relinquishing of agency which should instead be reclaimed by accepting and asserting responsibility.

This exhibition is not only a valuable survey of different contemporary expressions of the Indigenous experience, but feels like part of an important process of adaptation and of forming a mutual connection with the broader world of contemporary Australia.

It is, as already mentioned, a very long way from the world of the Aboriginal Memorial: many Indigenous artists today are of mixed ethnic background, so that there is an increasing blurring of the ethnic and cultural boundaries; many or most have also grown up in a modern education system and attended universities or art colleges. They are heirs as much to the Western tradition as to their Indigenous traditions.

This process will no doubt continue to unfold, and will lead to greater interconnection between peoples and cultures; the antagonistic postures that some still find it advantageous to adopt will gradually become culturally obsolete. I was fortunate enough to attend the Festa della Repubblica celebrations in Sydney the night before seeing Ceremony, and to hear the remarkable William Barton not only playing the didgeridoo alone, but also with an Italian string quartet, including improvising on both the Italian and Australian national anthems. It was a striking lesson in the way that cultural traditions, even when very different, can speak to each other, find points of intersection and affinity, and celebrate a common humanity.

Fourth National Indigenous Art Triennial: Ceremony
National Gallery of Australia, until July 31

NGA

Vivien Anderson Gallery /NGA