APY art scandal: Stretch to believe report has drawn a line under it

Stills taken from video where a non-indigenous employee is seen contributing to a painting by (Indigenous) artist Yaritji Young.

No doubt the inquiry commissioned by the National Gallery of Australia was conducted in good faith, but it is hard to feel that it has done much to allay the suspicions that hang over the APY Art Centre Collective paintings, let alone the management of the APYACC.

On this last matter the report, while claiming to believe APYACC general manager Skye O’Meara’s assertions about the paintings in questions, clearly implies that there may be broader questions to answer about the conduct and management of the centre, but that those will be dealt with a separate South Australian government inquiry.   

The first problem with this report is that it is premised on accepting the statements of artists as fundamentally trustworthy. It would be nice to think that people always tell the truth, but humans have been known to do otherwise when money and livelihoods are at stake. And while the report tries to stress that interviews were conducted confidentially and without the presence of NGA or APYACC staff, it also admits the NGA liaised with the APYACC to organise and set up the interviews with artists and art centre staff. We are being asked to believe that neither of these interested parties suggested to the interview subjects how they should answer the questions put to them.   

Under these circumstances, the report’s claim that “interviewees were encouraged to speak freely” is disingenuous. Apparently some of the most important individuals were asked to provide statutory declarations, but clearly most were not willing to do so. Interestingly, this is not taken to invalidate their testimony, whereas later in the report the fact that some allegations of malpractice were considered unsustainable (for reasons not entirely clear) is taken as “significantly undermining the reliance we could place on the remainder”. 

The other main problem with the report is that it marks a considerable retreat, or strategic withdrawal, from the original defensive line that no white people are ever allowed to paint on Aboriginal pictures and that they have not done so in the works under consideration. Now it seems to be taken for granted that they are involved to varying extents, but that such practices are acceptable as long as the Aboriginal artists retain “creative control” of the process.   

Of course there is nothing wrong with assistants stretching canvases or even underpainting them; but after earlier characterising assistants as little more than servants, the report goes on to admit the possibility of far greater involvement in actually painting “shapes and forms that may be visible in the final work” and even in advising on composition and design with an eye to “market preferences”. All this sounds a bit alarming, but apparently it’s all right as long as the artists signing the paintings have retained “creative control”.

These are enormous concessions, but no doubt inevitable in the circumstances that are frequently hinted at in the report but whose consequences are never squarely faced: there is considerable pressure to turn out a large number of enormous paintings for a voracious market, and yet the artists are in many cases frail old women. As a dealer said to me recently, he couldn’t get a strong 30-year-old man to produce anything like this volume.   

Again, the report virtually admits production by a team in alluding to the methods of Western artists like Rubens; but what it omits to say is the market values such work according to the proportion that is autograph; works produced by the studio under the master’s direction are far less valuable than those by his own hand.

It is hard not to conclude that the judgment of the report’s authors is clouded by their evident admiration of the work. And finally, of course, the most damaging visual evidence, the video footage; that is apparently “outside the terms of the review”.

Christopher Allen is The Australian’s national art critic.