Indigenous art: Turning a culture into a commodity

Bush art is on its way to being recast as a pure product of public funding.

##BARGO until Friday 7 August 6.30pm Darwin time or 7.00pm EST## Nonggirrnga Marawili from Yirrkala with her winning bark painting Lightning in the rock at the Telstra National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art Award at Museum and Art Gallery of the Northern Territory.

There it was, laid out across Darwin in all its intricate, interconnected, state-funded splendour, the modern Aboriginal art industry: an archipelago of umbrella groups and capacity-building projects, of peak bodies and cultural initiatives, a complete ecosystem, a reef structure of organisations fringed around the mother island of the Telstra ­National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art Award.

What highly evolved niche items this realm of art and culture now contains! Modish, up-to-the-minute versions of traditional designs, paintings and barks in unfamiliar colours and strange sizings, collaborations, installations, all intensely curated, all competing to win the eye at first glance.

Last weekend in the little Northern Territory capital the curious onlooker could inspect a bustling Aboriginal Art Fair and take in its various workshops and performances, hop on the Indigenous Art Bus for a trip to the satellite exhibitions at the Parap cultural precinct, or live dangerously and visit the Salon des Refuses on Darwin wharf, where pieces rejected by the NATSIAA judges were on view.

Deep in the murk of the waterfront Convention Centre, more than three dozen remote community and regional art centres showed their canvases and carvings and weavings amid display stalls detailing the achievements of Arts NT, the National Gallery’s indigenous arts leadership program and even that overarching presence in the Aboriginal art world, the Copyright Agency, administrator of the market-sapping resale royalty scheme.

Variety. Exotica. But despite this semblance of rude health and busy diversity, and despite the continuing multiplication of its programs, the archipelago of remote community indigenous art has yet to recover from the slump of recent years. Aboriginal art in the bush is now well on the way to being recast as a pure product of public funding, a vast and serried GONGO, or government-organised non-government organisation, delivered under strict guidelines, with the best intentions, and the results of this structure are increasingly clear in the works made and exhibited.

The patron and continuing underwriter-in-chief of the new bush arts archipelago is Arts Minister George Brandis, who this month announced $22 million in annual funding for 97 organisations to support and develop professional indigenous arts practice and — an amusing phrase — “further strengthen the sector” by measures such as employing 300 Aboriginal and Torres Strait arts workers in communities: men and women who are thus transformed into salaried, state-paid artists. Culture thus becomes a certified welfare activity.

There is an idea behind this largesse. It is spelled out in the official indigenous art centre plan of the Ministry for the Arts: “Art centres primarily support the production and marketing of indigenous art and the intergenerational transmission of stories of law and culture.” The last, all-justifying claim here is not just wrong but, rather tragically, it is the exact reverse of the truth: any culture that needs to be backed with public funds is already in deep crisis, and the subvention will only further the decline from autonomous cultural stem into touristic schmaltz.

The long-term effects of this large-scale bureaucratic takeover of indigenous art are still unfolding, but its mid-term conse­quences are already plain, in the form of the visual productions now on view at showcases such as Darwin’s Art Week and the Cairns Art Fair. As with all such official, governmentally approved or corporately backed extravaganzas, a large publicity and promotional machine underpins the enterprise: national media are flown in as indispensable adjuncts, in a bid to court editorial favour and spread and influence the word.

Guidelines and industry best practice standards multiply; seminars and symposiums gain prominence. Step by step, indigenous art becomes more and more a construct. A kind of flattening out and homogenisation of the paintings and sculpted objects made in the bush has become noticeable in recent years, and this impression was reinforced by the 2015 ­NATSIAA exhibition, which includes only 65 finalists, more than 50 of them art centre works. The jewels of the show were a politically barbed print by Torres Strait artist Glen Mackie, detailing the indigenous version of the tall-poppy syndrome, and a pair of wildly expressionistic pieces by Yirrkala bark painters Nonggirrnga Marawili and Nyapanyapa Yunupingu. In the “Salon” was an intriguing canvas by Peter Mungkuri from Iwantja Arts of Indulkana, a South Australian desert community.

But the standout work was a large, untitled, elaborately detailed painting that formed the centrepiece of Kanaputa, a classically beautiful Papunya Tula Artists show at Paul Johnstone Gallery. It came from the hand of Nanyuma Napangati, a Pintupi woman from Kiwirrkurra in the sandhill reaches of the northeastern Gibson Desert — austere and subtly varying country, much like the canvas itself, a composition in muted colours that capture the dunefield realm of light and heat and haze, a masterwork that conveys at once a way of ­seeing and a world.

What to make of this pattern of rare, spectacular peaks in a wide, broad, almost featurelessly consistent field? Several distinct factors that help to potentiate work of high quality stand out. Iwantja Arts, where a handful of senior men have recently begun pouring out exquisite paintings, is a standard desert art and crafts centre, but its new co-ordinator has brought an energy to the operation: good ground conditions for senior artists to fulfil their vision are in place. This is very much the old art centre model from the mid-1990s, dependent on personal chemistry between artists and their animating outside helper and guide.

Yirrkala’s example illustrates a quite different trend. The art centre at Buku Larrnggay Mulka is well-established: it will celebrate its 40th anniversary next year. It attracts extensive public funding, and uses it well: it has grown from a shack to a large multimedia cultural studio. Under the watchful eyes of its long-time co-ordinator, Will Stubbs, and his colleague Kade McDonald, and the impetus of its pioneer innovator Gunybi Ganambarr, the art centre has transformed the template for northeast Arnhem Land bark painting and wood carving: several of the most radical experiments by its artists were selected for this year’s NATSIAA. It is also marking its 20th year as a printmaking centre. A show of its recent prints, on view at Nomad Art in Parap, included a spectacular piece by ­Ganambarr alongside a dark and understated work by the more classically inclined Yumutjin Wunungmurra. Buku Larrnggay has also sent out a majestic set of waterlily design barks by Malaluba Gumana to Annandale Galleries in Sydney, and is dispatching a concept show to the Istanbul Biennale: it had two capsule exhibitions featuring work by its long-time art worker Barayuwa Mununggurr on view in Darwin galleries this week.

Yet all these undertakings pale by comparison with the large barks by Nyapanyapa and Nonggirrnga hung in the NATSIAA: ­intensely subjective interpretations of traditional emblems by two women from the old Yolngu clan world. No matter how this output of new work from Yirrkala is weighed and considered, it testifies to a high level of energy and commitment. Yet Buku Larrnggay is the ultimate subsidised, grant-supported art centre. For all the striking individuality of its artists, each with their own recognisable style and trademark technique, it is a communitarian operation. Its pre-eminence comes not from profit but from the prestige it has built up among collectors over long years, and from its cultural capital. There is a pattern of continuous engagement between the co-ordinators at Yirrkala and the artists: Buku is Aboriginal-controlled and directed in fact, not just in word.

Papunya Tula Artists has followed a very different kind of road to success as an indigenous art-making operation. Its origins lie in the first days of the Western Desert art movement. It nurtured the great Pintupi bush artists of Kin­tore in the 90s, and gradually became synonymous with clean, large-scale, contemporary-seeming work. In more recent years many of the most senior artists in its stable have died, and the forces of art world mode and fashion have shifted south to the Pitjantjatjara desert’s more splashy colourists, while PTA has attempted to expand its markets overseas.

The collapse in the demand for high-end Western Desert paintings in the wake of the 2008 global financial crisis and the introduction of the Australian government’s resale royalty scheme have made the past few years a testing time for the company, which, alone among frontline art centres, is almost entirely self-financing. But PTA has never forgotten its key precept: the need to maintain close engagement with the artists in its two communities, where it runs fully staffed studio spaces. The result is work at the level of Napangati’s canvas at the Paul Johnstone Gallery, a composition developed as a result of the close relationship between the painter and a specialist Kiwirrkurra field worker.

Three separate pathways to quality, but one common factor: a close, consistent relationship between artists and co-ordinators, serving to create the space for free expression. It is the special, little-highlighted ingredient that has ­always defined the remote community art movement in Australia. It remains the trump card today.

A full review of the NATSIAA exhibition by The Australian’s national art critic, Christopher Allen, will appear in Review in The Weekend Australian on August 29.