A beautiful Yolgnu exhibition, but it cannot change the uninitiated

Exhibition traces Yolngu artistry through the generations, putting mastery of bark painters, and their mythology, in the spotlight.

Detail from Narritjin Maymuru’s Creation stories of the Manggalili clan c1965.

T

he Yolngu are a relatively small collection of peoples who live in the northeast corner of Arnhem Land, known as Miwatj. Their name, which means “people” in the complex cluster of local languages and ­dialects (Yolngu Matha), is spelt on the ­exhibition posters with a symbol from the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents the consonant group “ng”, a voiced velar nasal pronounced like the same ­sequence of letters in the words “English” or “anger”.

These tribes are both some of the most remote in Australia, from the perspective of the main centres of modern population, and also some of the few who had contact with outsiders before the arrival of the British in the late 18th century. They traded with Macassan ­fishermen who came to harvest the trepang or sea ­cucumbers, and even acquired from them a word for white men, “balanda”, a Macassan distortion of the word “Hollander”, referring to the Dutch who had been in the East ­Indies since the end of the 16th century. Through their contact with the Macassans, the Yolngu obtained modern tools, like steel axes, long before other Aboriginal tribes.

Over the course of the last century, the Yolngu have been studied by anthropologists for their complex kinship systems; had a close involvement with an important Methodist mission; and most famously, were pioneers of the modern land rights movement when they presented bark petitions to parliament objecting to the expropriation of land for a bauxite mine. They were involved in a court case that is generally considered to have laid the foundations for the later Mabo ruling. At the same time, a number of artists, singers and actors from the community have become prominent in Australia, like David Gulpilil or Geoffrey Gurrumul Yunupingu.

This exhibition is exceptionally interesting in covering several generations of artists from this region, including some works from the 1930s, and works from successive members of several families. They are essentially painted on bark, like so much of the best Aboriginal art; this is a medium that is inherently restrained in colour and disciplined in form, and which demands great skill and care to produce work of the highest ­quality. Like the bark paintings of the late John Mawurndjul, who came from further west in Arnhem Land, these works embody the stillness of mind and concentration of their making. They represent the antithesis of the commercial product that largely comes out of the APYCC lands, of recent and controversial memory.

Detail from Dhuwarrwarr Marika’s Bremer Island Story, 1996.

This is an impressive show, well-curated and displayed, with many beautiful works that reward closer attention, although on the whole the best pieces are from the second part of last century, when they were first painted for anthropologists, missionaries and collectors, transferring traditional imagery and mythical stories into a new and hybrid form, approximating to that of the modern and portable easel painting.

Some of the best of these painters include Mawalan Marika, who invited the Methodists to open the mission at Yirrkala in 1935, with his Djan’kawu creation story (1959); Narritjin Maymuru’s Creation Stories of the Manggalili clan (c.1965); Banapana Maymuru’s Yingapungapu (1974); or Dhuwarrwarr Marika’s Bremer Island Story (1996). There are some fine works from the last couple of decades as well, including by painters such as Mulkun Wirrpanda, but there seems to be a general drift away from fidelity to a tradition intimately known, and towards a concern to address an art market that loves scale, drama, slickness and the look of innovation.

An exhibition like this raises several important questions of a more general nature, including how we can tell that the earlier work here carries more conviction than the more recent, or indeed how we can recognise the Yolngu work in general as superior to most of the APYCC paintings. Ultimately, we have to ask how we are to understand art within radically different and foreign cultures – indeed can we really understand and enter into it, or do we simply admire it from the outside as a picturesque and exotic artefact, or a kind of material or ideological status symbol?

One of the most remarkable properties of art is that it can be understood across time, space and cultural differences. At a formal level, it is relatively easy for anyone to recognise quality of workmanship. I remember travelling to Indonesia decades ago, and being intrigued by ­wayang kulit shadow puppetry. As soon as I began to look closely at the puppets available for sale, it was clear some were better than others; there were cheap ones made for tourists, others of average quality, and others that were highly refined both in their cutting and their painting; and of course there were antiques that had been used in hundreds or thousands of ­performances.

Later I had the opportunity to visit the workshop of one of the greatest living makers of wayang kulit in Java and purchased a couple of puppets from him; by then I had a reasonable sense of the whole range of quality from mass-produced souvenirs to the best that could be crafted, even though I possessed only an amateur’s understanding of the culture and performance ­traditions to which these objects belonged. There was nothing arbitrary about this hierarchy, for anyone who gains some acquaintance with any category of artefact will soon perceive the differences between those that are more or less well-made, whether they be cultural insiders or outsiders.

Detail from Mawalan Marika’s Djan’kawu creation story, 1959.

We can have a similar experience with other kinds of human handiworks like furniture, oriental carpets or textiles more generally. At first, the variety of styles and patterns can be bewildering, but when you begin to look more closely, the objects themselves will teach you to see the difference. A little study of the techniques of weaving will help you understand grades of quality; reading about the history of styles and motifs and the distribution of styles across geographic areas will help you discriminate between pieces of different quality. There is plenty of room for personal tastes and preferences for one style over another, but quality of craftsmanship is essentially an objective matter.

These examples, however, are relatively simply ones drawn from crafts. It is a little more complex when one is suggesting that some of the more recent works in this exhibition carry less conviction than the earlier ones. In this case we are not just talking about quality of workmanship, but something else: it is that earlier works are visibly tightly focused on the traditional myths which are their subjects, and the decorative aspects of the paintings are subordinated to meaning; in some of the recent works, the focus seems to be increasingly on dramatic decorative effect and the original mythical content has become more elusive.

There is, however, a deeper sense in which art can communicate across time and culture. We read a fragment from a poem by Sappho, even in translation, in which she speaks of the shock of love and desire; or a Japanese haiku, again in translation, evoking spring rain or moonlight in a forest: and it is as though those experiences, captured and distilled into a few words centuries ago and far away, explode into life again in our own hearts. Paintings can change the way we see nature, and we leave an exhibition of Cezanne or of Chinese Sung Dynasty landscape or of Fred Williams’ paintings and etchings, seeing the world around with new eyes, the amorphousness of experience given new shape and thus new meaning. The effect of music in shaping feelings and sensibility is even more involuntary and mysterious.

Again, these experiences are essentially universal: that is, you don’t need anything more than a translation in your own language to be able to be able to read and be moved by a piece of literature. A quatrain by Omar Khayyam, a sonnet by Shakespeare, a passage from the Bhagavad Gita can move us at once even without us knowing anything about the cultural world from which they originated. Of course, our understanding of such texts will be immeasurably enriched and deepened by learning more about the environment from which they emerged; but the miracle is that even as voices coming to us from the darkness of time, these words that speak of things we all know by virtue of being human, and can touch us and change our lives.

Banapana Maymuru’s Yingapungapu, 1974.

This is because all these forms of art are open systems of meaning which any human being can read without special knowledge. They are, to use the technical expression, exoteric or public as opposed to being esoteric, that is, only accessible to an inner group with the specialist knowledge of initiates. In the same way, philosophy is exoteric, addressing any rational person, while mystical teaching is esoteric, appealing to initiates. Buddhist mandalas and the cosmic diagrams of the Jain religion are examples of esoteric art: works like this do not speak a universal language; we may or may not find their allusion to a mystical vision appealing, but they do not have the ability to give shape to our experience – at least not unless we commit to undertaking the spiritual practice to which they correspond.

Of course one could collect Buddhist mandalas without being an initiate, admiring them and coming to appreciate them as pieces of craft, like the shadow puppets mentioned earlier. Or one might enjoy their associations of exoticism or an alternative way of life without actually submitting to any corresponding spiritual discipline. But the fact remains that in such cases these images will not shape and articulate your experience of life any more than your collections of antique furniture will.

In the same way, much if not all Aboriginal art is essentially esoteric. It is avowedly about myths and stories that are secret and not to be divulged to non-initiates; this includes uninitiated Aboriginal people, and because this is a culture with rigid gender rules, there are stories that cannot be shared with men and others that must not be revealed to women. Paintings made for the art market – which is effectively all Aboriginal art – hold out the allure of referring to sacred myths, but at the same time deliberately omit or conceal the most important parts of the stories.

This leaves us with something of a conundrum about how we can truly appreciate Aboriginal art. It simply does not work like the exoteric art of other traditions; even with beautifully made and appealing paintings like many of those in the present exhibition. We can appreciate their value as artefacts, and we can admire the way they seem to allude to an ancient mythical world – or again we can respond to them for their sociopolitical associations – but they will not change the way we experience the world around us.

Yolngu power: the art of Yirrkala

Art Gallery of NSW to October 6