NATSIAA shows how urban trends eclipse Aboriginal art traditions - NICOLAS ROTHWELL, The Australian, August 14, 2014 12:00AM A SET of staged photo-portraits of young Sydney men, bare-torsoed, target circles painted on their chests: Tony Alberts We Can Be Heroes, the winner of this years National Aboriginal & Torres Strait Islander Art Award, is a spectacular, controversy-courting choice. Aesthetic thrill, political bite, contemporary feel: what connoisseur of up-to-the-minute creativity could ask for more? The piece expresses the artists sense that young Aboriginal men are targets for prejudice. It also typifies the new enthusiasms of the indigenous art establishment. Aboriginal arts journey from the remote settlements of the western desert to the gleaming gallery -spaces of modernity has taken 40 years, but it is complete now. Indigenous art in Australia is becoming a subset of the mainstream art space: defined by race and by its concerns, but less and less distinct in its methods and techniques. The way-stages of the transformation are plain enough in times rear-view mirror. Thirty-one years have passed since the first showing of the Aboriginal art awards exhibition in Darwin. It is 11 years since Tony Alberts colleague in the Brisbane-based proppaNow collective, Richard Bell, won the NATSIAA with his aggressively pitched piece, Bells Theorem, proclaiming in bold stencils the harsh truth of the art scene - Aboriginal Art - Its a White Thing. This was, as its happens, the same year that state governments, in concert with the commonwealth, began investing heavily in remote community art centres, acting on the theory that public funds could help preserve culture. Six years ago, in the wake of the global financial crisis, the boom market for indigenous artworks from desert and tropical communities crashed: the centre of gravity of the indigenous art sector shifted decisively towards state-supported projects, exhibitions, culture festivals and art fairs. This sediment of history explains much about the present condition of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander art-making: the works on offer, the curatorial philosophies, the all-too-evident shifts in fashion in the fine art marketplace, dominated as it is increasingly by institutional buyers. Last Friday was the opening night of the NATSIAA exhibition, sponsored by Telstra and held each year at Darwins Museum and Art Gallery of the Northern Territory: it is a convenient litmus to gauge current tastes and interests, and to check the wilder shores of indigenous art production at a dozen satellite shows. The NATSIAA has evolved, along with the movement whose course it tracks. It began as a small cameo and turned into an upbeat, Territory-focused affair. By the late 1990s it had become an event of the highest seriousness: few who saw the Telstra exhibitions of those years have forgotten the galleries full of majestic desert works or large, sombre barks from northeast Arnhem Land. The core of the remote indigenous art movement lay in the NATSIAA then. But over the past few years the scope of the award has gradually shifted: in the wake of Bells victory, it increasingly took art from southern and urban Aboriginal artists. It became, in effect, two shows in one. This has produced the pattern evident in recent times - evident in spades in the latest NATSIAA, where works by city-based indigenous artists predominate, hung side by side with art from the depths of the desert and the north. In this, the exhibition mirrors the new Aboriginal art landscape. A seismic shift has taken place, both in the primary and the secondary market. The golden time of the remote community art centres is over. Their works are no longer collected or admired or coveted as they once were. The state funding for the 200-odd community-based art centres continues for now, the fairs and shows go on, but sunset is approaching. Everyone involved in the indigenous art system knows that only a handful of the art centres are viable, and only a handful are producing inspired work. The cultural affairs bureaucracy brought them into being, but it has no capacity to maintain their artists indefinitely in the public eye. Many factors explain this pronounced decline in the general appetite for indigenous art of traditional accent: a vast oversupply of work, a simple change in fashions, the deteriorating public image of remote communities, the demise of old artists from the founding generations. The bleak results from recent auctions of traditional artworks tell the tale. A different indigenous art and culture is now in the spotlight: it has its own specialist curators, its stars and its interlocking networks. This years NATSIAA judges are drawn from that realm: two are indigenous curators from state galleries, Tina Baum of the National Gallery in Canberra and Clotilde Bullen from the Art Gallery of Western Australia. One is a project space curator, David Broker from Canberra Contemporary. They are part of a tight-knit world, and this may help explain the presence in the show of works by close relatives of the judges. Alongside Alberts winning piece they chose, for the secondary -prizes, a range of highly individuated compositions. The work on paper award went to a member of the cur-atorial circle, Nici Cumpston, a photographic artist who works at the Art Gallery of South Australia and was a NATSIAA judge three years ago. The three-dimensional art award went to an established favourite of the great galleries, Torres Strait Island printmaker and cultural impresario Alick Tipoti, for a dramatic large-scale mask, Kaygasiw Usul (Shovel nose shark dust trail reflected in the heavens as the Milky Way. The bark painting prize went to an innovative piece by Garawan Wanambi, a prominent member of the Gangan outstation school, and a new youth arts prize was awarded, for a fabric piece, to Kieren Karritypul from Daly River. To give a work of sheer, lush beauty a place in their panoply, the three judges chose as winner of the general painting prize a silvery, elaborately finished canvas by Daniel Walbidi, from Bidyadanga on the western deserts coastal fringe. These selections amount to a manifesto, a statement about the present position and future trajectory of indigenous art: an assessment that what speaks most strongly is new work that builds on traditional culture and memory, rather than work seeking to entrench culture in aspic. This implicit assessment is the capstone to a highly curated show. There are only 65 pieces on display and the great majority of them are works that push the boundaries of form, or experiment freely with old symbols and old emblems. The choices lean away from paintings and carvings in classical style. One can gauge the selection criteria employed with some accuracy, thanks to the staging at Darwins Stokes Hill Wharf of the second Salon des Refuses, which brought together about 70 of the NATSIAA entries not included in the MAGNT show. The Salon exhibition was full of paintings by desert artists who work within the grid of traditional story-cycle and iconography: figures such as Keith Stevens and Maringka Baker from Nyapari, Jakayu Biljabu from Punmu and a range of painters from Tjuntjuntjara in the Spinifex lands of the Great Victoria Desert. A separate show of Spinifex art is on view all through this month at Outstation Gallery in nearby Parap. It is a collection of poised, solemn works: they pulse with movements afterglow. These are paintings that have the quality of icons: they seem to become the events and remote sites they represent. NATSIAA explores different worlds of expression, but occasional pieces in its hang make plain what tradition modified by a strong personal sensibility can create: theres Nonggirrnga Marawilis overwhelming bark rendition of a lightning strike, theres an intricately painted topographic piece by Biddy Timbinah, the -underappreciated star of Halls Creek. Owen Yalandjas small bark Yawkyawk (Mermaid) is the jewel of the exhibition. But jewels are not the only, or the most valuable, currency in art today. NATSIAAs curators have placed the emphasis elsewhere. It is a show that wishes to proclaim the convergence of indigenous art with the contemporary scene. Its heroes are modern artists of Aboriginal and Islander background, rather than artists who still dwell in a distinct thought-world, far from the modern cultural domain. This is not a matter either for lament or for celebration: it is an evolution, nothing more, and the long neo-traditionalist phase of the past decade was merely an interruption in the onrush of this assimilating trend. Action, of course, produces counter-reaction: integration produces resistance as much as complicity. Such is the canvas today. The indigenous art movement is now firmly centred on identity politics, on race and the convolutions of the category: its definition and its persistence, its conflicts and its chagrins. Sentiment and nostalgia lurk in these thickets; grief and memory as well. Aboriginality is what the contemporary art-makers on view at this years NATSIAA have: their attribute. It is at once presented to the mainstream eye, offered up, and held back. The 31st Telstra National Aboriginal & Torres Strait Islander Art Award is on display at the Museum and Art Gallery of the Northern Territory in Darwin until October 26. tinyurl/n7nfxw6
Posted on: Fri, 15 Aug 2014 01:37:20 +0000
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